Dealing With Absence » h. styles au

19ᵀᴴ CHAPTER

                                                   19ᵀᴴ CHAPTER               

                      “Every moment we teeter on chaos and oblivion” 

Autumn has come silently as it always does, smoothly draining the bright green from the leaves and giving them yellow-orange-ish tones instead. For Elisha, however, it’s still so very prominent.

The routine inside the café hasn’t changed much; two or three aged, gentle couples, friends of Dora (consequently Elisha’s too, because by now she’s seen and talked to them enough to grow fond of those people as well) around for the breakfast, sometimes lunch, and that’s how far the costumers go.

If it wasn’t for the help Dorothy gets every now and then, the café wouldn’t even be up anymore, with how the bills – despite only a few, not many zeroes after the coma – are still too much for her to afford on her own. It’s sad, really, how this place might go to complete failure in days, weeks, months – maybe. The whole uncertainty of the business drawls Leesh into a bad mood sometimes, but they have managed something so far.

So many had told her it wouldn’t last more than a few months, at most. And, well. It’s been six years now since she first started, so, probably, the café is doing not-bad enough.

Albeit, now that the whole ecstasy has drifted away, Leesha can barely see how PJ’s new job is going to help this in any way. It was probably stupid of her to think there was a chance to turn the café into somewhere casual for people to hang around, one of those common places where groups of friends only meet by habit, because they feel like they fit in it and don’t see a particular reason to go anywhere else.

The café is so far from it.

Elisha loves it with all her heart.

Because it’s in the silence of an asleep café, with asleep shelves and asleep tables, asleep pictures on the wall and asleep kitchen, lazy wooden floors beneath her feet, shifting and creaking with her weight each time she walks in, it’s in it that she sees the world as it is outside. She witnesses the smoothness of the seasons changing, how the hectic environment of one of the most known cities in the whole entire world affects so many lives, but doesn’t disturb hers in the slightest.

Inside, she doesn’t have to hurry for the subway, doesn’t have to lose her mind over minor issues, doesn’t have to worry about leaving someone back home who might need her whilst she’s out, and doesn’t have to worry about facing the chaos the streets are at peak hours.

All in all, she just sits here and reads daily newspapers, pretends she cares about a world so close to hers; the same one she doesn’t belong to. It has never bothered her to follow that same routine, just after breakfast with everyone, when Bridgit is usually in the kitchen doing uni’s assignments, Dora out in the world living everything she didn’t have the chance to when she was younger; coming back to her place when necessary and just talking out simplicities as if the clock could tick faster with it.

Being alone has never bothered Elisha. Not one bit.

But she’s not opposing to the new company she’s been getting ever since Harry showed up. Every day during lunch time there’s one more plate on the table, one more glass, one more pair of cutlery. And once Edwin is back to his truck, and everyone back to their routines, Harry stays a while more, throwing darts on the wall (God knows where he got that from) and complaining about something nonsensical that Elisha pays more attention to than the actual necessary.