hopper's "boulevard of broken dreams"

prologue:

back where she started from, only this time a little bit different. there is a steady drizzle outside, noticeable only when it falls past the lonely street lamps in the parking lot outside. everything is closed, and the last customers have trickled (some more reluctantly than others) out the double doors, leaving the cosy warmth of a full cafe for the cold chill of wintry fog.

she helps put away books, straightens shelves, and chatters idly with co-workers about exasperating book lovers - the kind that leaves candy wrappers wedged in the armchairs back in psychology and a stack of fashion magazines with coffee cup stains in political science. the place is quieter than it has been all day, with only 5 people spread out in the store, shuffling and lost in their own thoughts.

she makes her way back to the cafe, cleans the espresso machines, helps with the dishes. there's a bucket of sanitizer and a rag, with which she proceeds to wipe tabletops, put up chairs. something seems out of place though, not quite right. in the mornings, they take chairs down, and there are either three or four per table, depending on the size. but at night, chairs have been shifted around - parties of six steal a chair from the party of two at the next table, groups are formed, clusters of humanity in the microcosmic space of a cafe table. she stops in the middle of the room, wet rag in hand and smiles to herself as she surveys the other tables. two chairs there, 5 at that one, 8 at the small table on the right...one playing solitary at a table in the middle. the people have gone, but traces of their laughter and low murmurings remain behind, filling the empty spaces with ghosts, phantoms everywhere you look.

slowly, her smile fades as she thinks to another time, when she never felt so exquisitely alone. she looks to the large windowed wall on the right, looks at the five lonely cars in the parking lot, the drizzle turned to sleet as it falls, then refocuses her eyes and sees just herself, reflected in the glass against the darkness of night, frowning. she is lost again, her mind a jumble of old memories, of cigarette smoke and pubs, of idle chatter in 5 different languages, and park benches filled with friends in the summer, of music and sunlight on the grass, and the lights of a small cobble-stoned city below. the fragments, the noise, the memories fill her head until she closes her eyes to make them stop - and in the stillness, in the darkness behind her eyelids and the silence she has created for herself, she remembers her last night, when there were simply two people in the world, awake in the dark, skin on skin, holding each other in fear of the morning...