Anastasia *on hold*

Chapter 4-Selflessness

ANASTASIA:

After my shift at the coffee shop was over, I had started making my way towards the hospital. I wasn't a nurse or a doctor or a surgeon, I was more of an unpaid therapy guru. I didn't give DIY classes on how to become a therapist, if that's what you're thinking. I usually just hung out with some of the patients and listened to their stories. My favorites are with the PTSD veterans, I love listening to the violent gore of bloodshed.

The walk to the hospital was quiet. I didn't mind my quiet walks, they were peaceful and gave me plenty of time to really contemplate over things. Usually just homework assignments.

Mr. Hood was going to give us a photo essay assignment soon, and he was going to pair us up with his senior college students since we were just juniors. He always felt that the older kids were more talented, and that they had some new-found glory about the world than us. This bothered me a lot, mainly because everyone around me was nowhere near my levels of creativity and imagination.

Car horns blared all around me, telling the drivers in front to move, while the drivers in front honked back to tell the others to piss off. I didn't like cars all that much. Don't get me wrong, they're convenient in some instances, but I felt that you always had to be on your A-game when it came to driving. You weren't allowed to daydream, you weren't allowed to enjoy the sights. You always had to be strictly alert or else you could get nearly killed. Walking never posed any problem for me like driving did. I could zone out, I could think, I could stop to enjoy the smell of freshly baked bread.

Roads and sidewalks also made me think like driving and walking did. I liked the way the roads were made. I liked how highways were like roller coasters for cars, ascending, turning, and descending. I enjoyed the smell of fresh asphalt being paved oddly enough, and I enjoyed watching the crew paint small white or yellow stripes a couple inches apart from each other. Using sidewalks made me feel more connected to the world however, I enjoyed allowing my toes to coincide with the slim craters in the concrete. I especially loved walking past hedges my height that had flowers fully bloomed. Those made for the best shots when I would find myself with my camera. I loved all the angles I could capture, I loved the texture they would show, I loved the simplicity of the soft colors with the dark green leaves. Especially night-blooming jasmine.

I lived in a small city, so walking place-to-place was never any real problem. The roads were small, not compared to the roads in Italy or anything, they were a tad bigger. Everything was close by though, the supermarket was just down the street from my college, and the coffee shop was in that bit of the plaza. The hospital that I would often visit was about a block or so from the plaza, not very far at all. I also visited the local parks. If it was anything about the small city of Clidesville, New York, it was that we had the best-and most- parks. Our parks were usually kept clean, with their own sanitation crew to clean up after a busy day. That's one of the several things I liked about this three hundred person town. Everyone was friendly and everything was clean.

My walk to the hospital consisted of my stopping to smell some flowers, visiting the local bakery where my brother Derek worked at, and stopping to chat with a couple of tourists who found themselves lost in search of a local dinner. I recommended them Tabitha's, she was the owner as well as chef and waitress of her dinner. She was a solid feminist. Not one who is so insistent that she doesn't shave, or burn down buildings in the sake of "equality," which I felt most feminists did, but she would rather have been independently working than fighting against the males. That was one of the main reasons why I enjoyed Tabitha's. She was always so endearing. Tabitha was a stout, 4'3, black woman in her early sixties who called everyone "Suga." What I loved about her, was that she would get so offended when someone would refer to her as "African American." Her argument was always "My skin is black, and I'm not offended by it. I'm not goin' ta make a mountain out of a molehill by some bullshite exuse fo' my ancestors bein' slaves. Ima find it kinda silly fo' all this nonsense when them white folk used other white folk as slaves ta!" she'd then go on to say, "You don't see them white folk gettin' pissed off about us callin' them Crackers, so why should I be offended by someone callin' me what I am?" She'd then go on to talk about the evils of communism and then proceed to ask what you would like for lunch.