There was something in the frenzy of her grey hair that made her recognizable to me at once. She was something like an old friend, one who, like me, was also walking the feral path. How I knew this, without exchanging a single word is beyond me, but knowing she was a friend, a comrade, made it easier to enter the room.
I came downstairs from the bedroom we had rented for the night to find her in the kitchen, trying her best to use a microwave, which she was obviously unfamiliar with. She was using a cloth to wipe the inside, where apparently, only moments before I had descended the stairs, she’d spilled coffee from her disposable coffee cup. It looked weathered, as if she had reused it about 30 times. When she had finished with the interior of the electronic box, she tried, in vain, to click the plastic lid back onto the cup. It kept slipping off.
But she wasn’t frustrated. Or humored. Nor did she seem to be in any kind of hurry, which most folk using a microwave seem to be. Instead, she looked completely content, like this is what she did every single morning, as if she had crafted a routine around the entirety of the microwave mishap.
Yes, this was all very familiar.
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