Blakely's Prediction

Blakely’s Prediction

Sarcasm allows you to say exactly what it is that you mean without the concern of injuring another person. Unless of course they choose to take you seriously, in which case you can mock them a second time, for failing to have a sense of humor.

Rhea’s little sister, Blakely, used to turn to me at Byzantine all the time, while we were working on something together, and tell me how much she hated me, after which she would laugh about it and smile, saying that she was only kidding. I will never be able to understand what is wrong with so many people, who are driven by such an overwhelming desire to hurt one another.

Similarly, on one night that Rhea and I were working together at Byzantine, I was telling her about some obstacle that I was facing, between trying to find childcare for Edmund and balancing my two work schedules. She turned to me and said the most bizarre thing. “I’m so glad I don’t have to worry about that. That would suck to have a mistake child.”

I stood there for a moment, as I allowed her words to sink in. In the past, she had always at least pretended to be polite, and so it was odd that she would be blatant in her rudeness. Like her younger sister, I expected her to laugh and say that she was kidding, but she never did. She just went about her own business as though she had said nothing, because she knew that there was nothing I could do about it anyway, even if I had chosen to. Who would ever believe me, when she was so darling and precious?

Jonah, as cold as he may have seemed on the surface, cared about children, however he liked to pretend that he found them distasteful. I’m almost certain that the real reason that he spent so much time telling people that he doesn’t like being around kids was only because he was saddened by the fact that he never had any. It would be perfectly in keeping with all that I witnessed of his nature, for him to say that he didn’t care for something, simply because he could never hope to attain it.

On my birthday, when I had carried Edmund in to Ophidian with me, so that I might ask Jonah how I would go about receiving my discount at Esurience, one of our sister restaurants, that night when I went out for dinner, he scowled down at my son, although I couldn’t understand why. What could my three month old son have possibly done to solicit such a response? The last time that he had seen my little boy, he had smiled at him, and now he only seemed to be filled with anger.

Perhaps he was only wondering to himself why Edmund’s father had decided that the three of us being a family was such a bad idea, as he grew in respect for me. Jonah’s opinions on the matter of standing by your commitments were well fixed, that summer. Although that meant that I would never have a chance to be with him, it was what won me over more than any other quality about him.

Jonah made it very clear to me, in every way, that my son’s welfare was one of importance to him, as he preserved the sacredness of my Sunday evenings with my little boy, and was able to spout out the days when I saw my son and the days that I did not, from memory. For that reason alone, I would have married him in a heartbeat, had he only asked.

Greyson, by far, was the most surprising in his outlook on children. One evening, as he and I worked with one another, I was complaining about how difficult it was to be a parent, and he looked at me very seriously and told me that I was the luckiest person there, to have someone so worthwhile to go home to, whereas so many of them had no one to offer them that kind of unconditional love. He explained to me that was the reason why so many of them drank so much.

If only for that reason alone, I have no choice but to accept the fact that we must love everyone, even difficult people like Greyson, no matter how unworthy of affection they may seem to be on the surface. Beneath it all, we are all the same. Every last one of us.

…

Jonah made it seem to people as though he hated the world, but I think that there was much more to him than he ever allowed the rest of the world to see. Something, somehow, had turned him cold and bitter long ago, and now he kept everyone else around him in constant fear of rejection, by scornfully tearing down anyone who was weak or pathetic, in his eyes.

Interestingly enough, though, Jonah also had this habit of bringing up obscure details about the lives of other people whom I had barely given a second glance, and speaking compassionately about their struggles as though they were his own.

I am pretty sure that, deep down, Jonah accepts everyone. However, he has learned that if you want to be at the top of your game, there has to be someone who loses, and by insulting others, he asserted the fact that we were so much better than them. By doing so, everyone around him wanted to make sure that they were included in the we.

…

“True friends stab you in the front.”
Oscar Wilde

I think that, in truth, Rhea’s little sister Blakely did have a soft spot in her heart for me, although her loyalty to her sister meant far more to her than her personal feelings toward me.

One night, I was standing by the front register with her at Byzantine, as we spoke about what our husbands would be like someday. I was despairing over the fact that I would never have a husband, when she looked at me, and said, “Yes, you will, and his name will be Jonah.”

Of course, where we live, Jonah is an exceptionally common name, and so it made perfect sense that it would have been one of the first names to have come to her mind. There were three alone, who worked for David’s restaurant company. Nevertheless, I was caught off guard completely by what she had said. I turned around in awe, and I just stared at her, without moving.

“Why did you say that?” I asked, trying to keep my voice light and unaffected.

“Well,” she said, “when you said that you would never have a husband, and I looked at you, the name Jonah popped in my head for some reason.”

It was so strange. I hadn’t told anyone about my crush on Jonah yet, and even if anyone had figured it out, he had never gone by his given name. For me to refer to him by his given name, as I do with you, keeps him as cleverly hidden as he ever was. No one had ever called him Jonah, not even his own mother.

Besides that, Blakely didn’t work with me at my other job, and so she couldn’t have known, could she? I knew his real name, because I had specifically made it a point to ask him in person what it was, but I only ever called him by it in my thoughts, because I found it to be a much handsomer name than JP. There was no way that I could comprehend for her to have known.

Even if Rhea had noticed anything peculiar about my behavior towards JP, which I’m sure that she had, and spoken to her sister about it, which I’m sure that she had, she wouldn’t have called him Jonah. Even among her closest friends, she only ever spoke of him in a professional manner, hesitant to admit feeling any other way towards him than the most acceptable one, however her behavior may have contradicted such truth. She never used his given name when she spoke of him, as she spoke of him often, always as JP.

I cocked my head to the side, and looked at her quizzically as I said, “I sort of care about someone with that name.” It was her turn to be surprised, and she asked me if I were making that up just to make her laugh. There was a lot about her that seemed to be false and misleading, as with her sister, but this once, her look of surprise as well as the skepticism in her tone of voice, seemed to be entirely sincere.

When I shook my head at her and frowned, she smiled at me and told me, “Well, I guess that you’re going to marry him.” It wasn’t possible of course, but even just the idea of her prediction being true was encouraging for me to hear.

I know now that she was being truthful, in her ignorance of such a person existing, because in the time to come, once she did learn of Jonah’s existence, she was incapable of keeping the humor of such a revelation to herself, as she laughed to my face about my complete lack of any common sense whatsoever.
I should have guarded my heart more carefully, though, against things that simply weren’t true, however much I might have liked to hope for the opposite. Everyone knows, of course, that there is no such thing as a soulmate. We were not created with one other person out there who was meant to be our missing piece, to fulfill some part of us that no other person was ever able to before, as beautiful and romantic as that might sound.

I couldn’t help but find it peculiar, though, that even as I walked past the windows of Ophidian the next day, on my way toward the front door, I was questioning the existence of something so nonsensical to myself, and Jonah just so happened to choose that moment to look up at me from where he stood on the other side of the room, as he caught my eye before I could even finish my thought.

Even from a distance, it always seemed as though he were reading me, seeing right through every one of my completely ridiculous ideas, although that clearly wasn’t the case. I couldn't figure out whether our similarities meant that he said what everyone else was thinking, or if his own thoughts closely mirrored my own

That was my ever present question. Are you just like everyone else, or are you in fact, just like me? It was the unfairest thing in the world that any human being could possibly seem to fit so perfectly within my every ideal, although it could never be so.

…

“The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read.
Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date.
Otherwise you begin excusing yourself.”
Margaret Atwood

Jonah doesn’t read books. In fact, he hasn’t read one in years, and so I have nothing to fear from putting my heart out there for the world to see, because he will never be the wiser. However, if I ever were to see him again, God forbid face to face, this is what I would say.

“The most disorienting thing about working alongside you was what happened when I prayed about you. The first time that I ever lost myself in thought about you was on a Tuesday night. We were busy, but you weren’t there.

I can’t remember why we were so crowded, but for the first time since I had met you, I felt what it was like to miss you. I saw someone who looked a little bit like you pass by one of the front windows, and I prayed about you, and I hoped that you were having a good night, wherever you were.

As the night wore on, I did my best to dedicate my attention to my guests, but my thoughts were fixed on how much more smoothly the restaurant would be running if only you were around to establish order.

You will never know how the atmosphere changes once you enter the room. Suddenly, everything is a little more vibrant, and endurable, regardless of circumstance.

As long as I live, I will never forget how my heart jumped as I was entering an order for one of my tables into the POS station, and I heard a voice that sounded just like yours. I looked up, and I was flooded with warmth, simply because you were there.

That is the only time that I ever saw you wearing that hat, but you looked quite handsome. It made absolutely no difference in the world, but having you sit there at the bar made the entire night so much better for me. You had a friend who accompanied you that night, and I couldn’t be certain, but it seemed almost as though he cast me a strange look when I made eye contact with him.

I felt, in that moment, as though you had spoken to him about me, unfavorably of course, but the thought of that being true when we had only just met was too unlikely to even consider.

The shirt that you wore had the words ‘You Are My Family’ emblazoned on the front, and I thought that was beautiful, and was curious about where those words had come from, and what the meaning behind them could have been. I am pretty sure that they were from the line of a song, from some music artist I have never heard of before, but it is always possible that I could be completely wrong.

As the night wore on, one of my tables asked me if they could see a picture of my son, and so I went to the back hall to retrieve my phone from where it was stowed away in my purse, and scroll through my images for just the right picture of my baby.

As I stood in the back hall, looking through albums on my phone that were filled with photos of my son, I still couldn’t get you off of my mind. For some reason, I felt the desire to voice my thoughts aloud as I prayed, but I knew that I had seen Carmelo somewhere nearby only just recently, and so my thoughts remained, for my fear of them being overheard.

Silently, I began to pray that I would get over this, just as quickly as I had fallen into such a hopeless circumstance. Nothing good could come of it, and so surely all that I had to do was continue to remind myself that you were only one, insignificant person, and that these feelings would fade away in time. If only I could have just made myself believe that.

As I turned around the corner from where the back hallway was hidden from sight, I looked up at the chair you had been seated in all evening, and you were no longer there. I breathed a sigh of disappointment, just as someone brushed past me, to return to the bar from the back hallway. Of course, it was you.

I was so frightened by your sudden appearance right behind me that I almost gasped, but I caught myself, and behaved coolly and calmly. I have no idea how long I may have kept you waiting patiently behind me as I stood there on my phone, lost within my thoughts, but I was incredibly grateful that I had remained silent, rather than praying out loud, as I had nearly done.

If I had done something so foolish, who knows what you would have made of me? I had been fearful of one of the other guys overhearing my thoughts, if I had been to voice them out loud, but I had never even considered that you might have been anywhere nearby.

I am not alone, though, in voicing my thoughts aloud. Once, as I was singing quietly to myself, you walked by and muttered, ‘That’s a nice voice,’ under your breath, so quietly that I wasn’t entirely sure whether or not I had even heard you. I used to love singing, but it made me incredibly shy to think of you listening to it, and so from then on, if you ever entered the room while I was singing to myself, I immediately became silent.”

...

I have never really spent much time singing in my lifetime. When I was a little girl, one of my friends at school told me that I wasn’t talented in that aspect, and so ever afterwards, I have always been much too shy to sing in front of anyone.

The only time that ever seems to change is when I care deeply for someone. For whatever reason, being in love makes me want to sing all the time. If I am ever married, we will always have soft music playing in our house, and I will be a little songbird for my husband. I do not think that it’s true at all that any of us can’t sing. I think that the fact of the matter is simply that most of us aren’t willing to try.

The same holds true for my little boy, Edmund. Sometimes when I am driving, I go to change the radio station, and between stations I realize that my baby is in the backseat singing along with the radio. You can bet anything that I instantly go back to whatever song it is that Edmund was singing, and let him finish his song.

Ever since before he was born, my son has absolutely loved music, as he danced playfully to the sweet melodies of Alicia Keyes' soulful ballads from my tummy. He has a musical soul, and I think that it’s beautiful.

There is so much that you can learn from raising a child. Sometimes my son tears up pieces of grass and throws them onto the surface of the water in our pool, just to watch them float. All that I can see is something else that I have to clean up, and all that he can see is how beautiful the floating grass is, and neither one of us can understand how the other possibly couldn’t understand our perspective.

There was one time as well, that Edmund was in the back yard playing, and he wanted to start eating a stick. When I took it away from him, he cried inconsolably about such a loss. That must be how I appear to God sometimes, like a child crying about having a stick taken away. I sometimes forget how insignificant even the biggest of my problems are.

…

There was one occasion in which I was speaking to one of the cooks, a sweet, older man who always addressed me as preciosa. As I spoke to him with what little conversational Spanish I knew, I overheard Jonah in the office, talking to himself. He said, “That’s the most beautiful sound.”

He could have been referring to anything at all, like the sound that his phone made as he received a text message from his wife, or something sweet like that, but at that moment, I thought that he was talking to himself about my voice.

I peeked my head into the office, and asked him what he was talking about, at which point he looked at me for a moment, considered his response, and then answered, “I was just saying that his jacket is beautiful,” as he pointed to the coat that the old cook that I had been speaking to wore.

Jonah was such a complete mystery, and he was absolutely horrible at lying, or so I had thought, but none of that mattered to me when I compared it to how happy I felt when he was around.

...

It is the most evident symptom of love, the degree to which we are willing to pardon that which is inexcusable. That is why we push boundaries. It is our way of asking, “Just how much do you love me?”

One night, Jonah said something rude to me, and I felt very hurt by it. I can’t remember what it was, but I confronted him about it before going home. He apologized, and thanked me for bringing it to his attention, so that he could correct it.

I told him that I was relieved that I had talked to him, because otherwise I simply would have hated him forever, which made him smirk. He smiled down at me in that way of his, clearly thinking, “Right, like you could ever hate me.”

He laughed a little, put his hand on my shoulder, and told me to get home safely. He’s right, though. I suppose that I could never hate him, regardless of what he ever did.

…

Caleb stood on the expo line one evening, complaining about relationships, and how complicated women are. As he spoke, I caught Jonah’s eye and smiled. To humor him, I turned to Caleb and gave an exaggerated sigh for effect, as I told him, “Trust me, you have no idea.”

As I walked around the corner to put an order in for one of my tables, Jonah stood in front of me, smiling down at me in that spectacular way of his, and I felt a wave of relief wash over me, as I realized that I had absolutely nothing to worry about.

Shortly thereafter, I was sitting in a chair at the end of the bar, immersed in thought, when Jonah emerged from the kitchen, holding two plates of food in his hands. As he walked past me, he leaned in closely to me, and whispered in my ear, “These are for you, lovely girl.”

I watched him drop off my food for me, and my heart just about exploded as I allowed those words to sink in. My fear was gone. Caleb had been entirely wrong. Jonah had absolutely no problem whatsoever with my affection for him, and he felt similarly, if on a much, much smaller scale.

The underlying message in all of his dealing with me was this, “You are lovely, sweet, and very young. You have a good little boy who needs you, and you really need to remember that I am married. I am too old for you, and I have nothing to offer. Please move on.”

Jonah stood at about six foot two, give or take, but his arrogance made him seem much more commanding in my mind’s eye. His hair was that indeterminate color that falls somewhere on the spectrum between dark ash blonde and light beige brown. He used to be stocky, apparently, but he must have lost weight by keeping so busy running a new store with so little help. His friends mentioned that he had lost about thirty pounds since the store’s opening, as though things like that matter once you fall for someone’s heart, even if it’s a little messed up. Or a lot messed up.

When I met him, he was built perfectly. His arms were toned, and I heard him mention ever so casually that he worked out, on a few occasions. His eyebrows were handsomely arched above the most devastating pair of eyes. They were green, though they contained many various colors, as jumbled together as the multifaceted persona within him.

Pale blue and brown were fighting for attention amidst the green iris, as speckles of black were strewn about over all. His smile rarely made an appearance, but when it did, it was perfect, and it was kind. More commonly present was his distinguished frown, as well as a glass of some toxic substance to wash away whatever pain he held beyond those captivating eyes.

I always felt as though I could remember him from somewhere before, although I could never place just where that might have been. It was almost as though I had dreamt about him, before ever meeting him in person.

I can only think, though, that when we feel this way about someone, upon first laying eyes upon a complete stranger, it can only mean that we somehow know that they will be one of our teachers, in some important aspect, and that they will be with you in heaven one day.

…

“No one can serve two masters.
Either you will hate the one and love the other,
or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other.”
Matthew 6:24

Whereas he numbed himself with liquor and beer, and surrounded himself at work with pretty women who longed for his attention, in an attempt to distract himself from how miserable he felt each day, I busied myself with striving for perfection, altering my appearance constantly, eating a strict diet, keeping my home in perfect order, balancing my finances, and doing all that I could to have something that came close to resembling success in my life.

The construct that I came to depend upon in order to feel happy was as follows. My son filled my heart with unconditional love, which was returned in equal measure, as well as providing me with a sense of purpose. My sisters and my brother were my closest family, and they looked after me, and made me feel wanted and cared for. Byzantine helped me to get the bills paid, although I paid very little attention to anything that happened there, and began to slowly resent that place for every shift that I spent away from the job I truly enjoyed, whereas Ophidian was filled with the smiling faces of my friends, who filled my heart with joy, and were always happy to see me.

Being around Jonah made my heart feel whole for the first time in as long as I could remember, almost like it had never even been broken to begin with. If he only knew how bitter and angry I had been, before I met him.

He had no way of knowing that, though, and so he had nothing to compare with the happiness that poured out of me whenever he was around. As long as all of these things were in balance, it felt almost as though I was truly happy. Jonah had an insatiable need for novelty and admiration, though, and that meant that I was constantly covering up new wounds.

Apparently, he drank alcohol from the time that he woke in the morning until the time that he fell asleep, according to the guys who went out to bars with him. I can even remember that for his New Year’s Resolution, he would decide to replace beer with harder alcohol in it’s place. I cannot even begin to imagine what must be wrong with me to have cared so much for such a person.

His hands were very soft, which was surprising, for such a tough person. He was by no means weak, but his power resided within the cool, aloof manner in which he carried himself, as well as the ability to make nearly anyone feel insignificant beneath his steady glare.

His praise was always in short supply, but that only served to make it all the more valuable than anyone else’s. No one ever wanted to let Jonah down. His skin was pale, and his face had the same warm tones that mine has, although he hasn’t the luxury of cosmetics as I do to camouflage such a small flaw.

…

One night, as I slowly plowed my way through the snow in my small car on the forty-five minute drive from Byzantine to my mother’s home, I realized with horror that all of my makeup had been left behind in the bathroom at work.

I was frantic about what a disaster this would be, until I called Brant, who was the general manager that we had for that given moment. He was exceptionally kind, and thought absolutely nothing of allowing me to make the drive to Liberty before coming in for work the following morning.

In exchange for his good naturedness, I stopped by McDonald’s and brought him some warm breakfast. The way in which that restaurant stood was based upon this principle, that of giving and receiving love in equal measure. I was so thankful for the love that I was shown, and for the kindness that I was always sure to find, that I looked for ways to somehow pay it back, although I did so quietly.

Outside of the managers’ office door, there had always been a precariously situated ladder that was used to climb up into a small loft of uncertain safety measures, where the lines for all of the restaurant’s soft drinks were located, if ever they needed replacing.

Generally too lazy to bother with unnecessary measures, most people left the debris and the empty boxes and caps from our months since being open lying about on the floor that was hardly ever seen.

Needless to say, the room had seen better days. It seemed to be a thankless task, but as soon as I started to clear it all away, it felt nice to know that I was making our work home just a little bit nicer, in however small a way. It felt even better to know that I had done so in secret, without being asked to do so. I didn’t particularly care if anyone took notice, but for whatever reason, it meant something to me to take care of something that had been overlooked and forgotten, for such a long while.