A quote: “Artistic temperament sometimes seems a battleground, a dark angel of destruction and a bright angel of creativity wrestling.” ~~ Madeleine L’Engle
I’ll start with a story …
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I barely remember ordering coffee, but when the waitress brings it I’m grateful the look in her eyes is understanding, not pity.
Not that pity would have been out of place. Too many shots last night, too much self-pity to be attractive to any man at the bar. Oh, I had been perfectly put together. From the hugged-in-all-the-right-places Alexander McQueen dress, down to Jimmy Choo pumps. I had it all when I walked in.
Except, I had nothing.
Career at defcon 2, my boyfriend left me … and he took the dog.
Dear lord, my life’s an urban country song.
“Change it.”
I look up from my coffee, and spot the lone, old man at the end of the counter, “Excuse me?”
He takes a slow sip from his mug. He turns towards me, “Change your life.”
“Oh, I see. Sure. Just drop everything and … what? Go to some small town and open a bakery? Or is that a florist shop? I mix up my movies.”
I’m laughing, but he’s not, “What you’re doing now, are you happy?”
“I don’t want to be rude …”
“Missy, you do what you want, no nevermind me. Just I’ve always wanted to nudge you instead of just looking over you.”
He set down his mug, pausing next to me on his way to the door to look in my eyes, “Just want you to make yourself happy.”
I watch, stunned, as the door closes behind him but he never appears in the windows. I remember his eyes. The eyes of the anonymous young man who pulled 11-year-old me from a riptide.
The man I always called my Guardian Angel.
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Now, it’s your turn.
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. featured image, cropped, Adobe Stock standard license.
Everybody out here keeps wanting to open bars. After all, back in the Wild West every town had at least one saloon, and miners are going to want to drink.
Except the High Frontier isn’t quite like the Wild West. For starters, rockjacks are going to be spending a substantial amount of time in the sort of environments where you really don’t want to have anything messing with your mind. Not to mention that alcohol can do weird things with how nitrogen dissolves in your blood, not to mention how well the normal EVA prep routines get nitrogen flushed out, so you don’t want to be negating the benefits of having a pure-oxygen atmosphere in your EMU.
So everybody ’round here laughed at me when I opened a coffee shop — but it’s amazing how many of the rockjacks come here during their off days. The Western theme probably helps, because I notice how many of them have figured out how to piece together cowpoke cosplays for their visits. Like the older gent at the table over there, sipping at his mocha in a mug that looks like it was hand-thrown on a wheel and fired in a wood-burning kiln. He’s an independent, has his own little ship, and he’s doing quite well. Better than some of the big outfits, quite honestly, because he doesn’t have their overhead.
He comes over here about once every fifteen to eighteen days, depending on how his circuit takes him through the orbits of the local asteroids. Sometimes he tells me stories about his life before he came out here, and sometimes there are days when he’d rather just brood over what was and what may yet be.
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