Departure

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Wordlessly she sat on the aged wooden bench, patiently waiting for a bus that had come once, long ago, leaving her behind. The world, lost in silent thought, took no notice.
The tall, lanky girl with blonde hair gazed intently at the green canvas bag holding her meager possessions. The color, faded from years of disuse in storage, was plain and nondescript, fraying at the seams - much like her life.
Her hands picked listlessly at the tattered sweatshirt draped across her lean frame. Idly fingering the tired fabric, her mind drifted through the annals of the past.
The daughter of a retired Air Force colonel, she was the youngest of seven children. She was only three years old when her mother passed away, a face she could hardly remember. The voice, however, is what had haunted her dreams. To this day, she could still recall the soft humming as she lay across her mother’s chest, a lullaby of some kind. She had never heard the words, if there were any. To be honest, she did not believe there were. It was a lullaby without chorus, a mirthless tune – much like her life.
Thrusting her hands into the pockets of her sweatshirt, she lowered her gaze to stare at the thinning denim stretched across her legs. It was a habit she had developed as a young girl, a defense mechanism from her father’s angry lectures. Duty and honor, she recalled. There was never any talk of love. She would tune out, lost in deep thoughts of her own, waiting to be released to her room. Later, she would lie awake in her bed for hours, dreaming of the day she would pack all she owned into that surplus duffel bag on her top closet shelf and board a bus bound for Somewhere Else. Anywhere would do; sometimes, it was off to Hollywood, to become an actress, and at other times it was New York, aspiring to dreams on the runway. That dream had been shattered, along with her nose. She had made the mistake of overcooking chicken for her then live-in boyfriend. She burned his dinner. He smashed her face.
In reality, it was more than her nose that had been broken. Later, she would reflect on her battered face in the mirror; terrified at the grotesque angle her nose was twisted, she realized the reflection did not register in her mind. She saw a face that had once been beautiful, now drawn and haggard. High cheekbones, once elegant, were now taut with skin stretched too tight over them. Dull, lifeless eyes that had lost their luster receded into sunken, hollow sockets, rimmed by dark circles. Her countenance, once the envy of her girlfriends and the pursuit of countless men, now reflected what her spirit had become: broken.
The sound of approaching footsteps snapped her back to reality. Materializing out of the opaque fog swallowing the corner bus stop was a lone figure; a man, judging from the stiff posture and brusque movements. He stopped some distance away, yet clearly visible, as if intent on being seen – by her. Recognition slowly crept over her, her recollections frozen. Of all the men who could stand before her right now – and there had been many – this was not one she wanted to see. She desperately needed the face in front of her to vanish, to be replaced by someone else - anyone else. There were many faces she wanted to remember, but only one she needed to forget. She turned abruptly, fear falling away, replaced by a dread she felt for this man, a ball in the pit of her stomach, stealing the breath from her body. My mind is playing tricks on me. The fog – that’s it. The fog is making me see things. But she was not seeing things, she knew; too often, she had been forced to look upon that face.
Feeling the world begin to swim all around her, she thrust out her arm to lean on the concrete wall beside her. The cold cement beneath her fingers, the rough-hewn gravel, pockmarked from decades of exposure to the elements lent her some support as she waited for the world to right itself. She fought desperately to regain control of herself, determined not to fall apart again. Not here, she told herself. Not in front of him. Steeling herself against her emotions, she drew several deep breaths, letting the air course in and out of her body, the dampness washing away her feelings of desperation and strengthening her resolve.
Slowly, deliberately, she turned around to face her father, who stood some fifteen feet away, his grizzled features ghastly in the pale neon light of the corner liquor store. Time came to a gasping halt, collapsing on the slick asphalt.
The silence that stood between them gave no ground, neither retreating nor advancing. It simply hung there, weathered by age but strengthened by time. Her father opened his mouth, as if to say something. Just then, the sound of an approaching bus snapped the tension like a kite on a very long string, finally free in the celestial realms. The bus rolled to a stop, idling on the corner. She heard the soft whisk of the opening doors, her long-overdue invitation. A lonesome traffic light shifted from red to green. The cry of a seagull from the nearby pier sounded in the distance. An overhead lamp flickered, leaving the intersection in intermittent darkness. She gazed at her father, searching his face for some clue, some comprehensible reason to his presence here. Staring mutely back at her, he offered no explanation, his face bereft of justification.
Slinging her duffel over her shoulder, she proffered one last look at the man whose legacy of torment she was finally leaving behind. Wordlessly, she boarded the bus as the driver closed the doors and put it in gear. Gradually it crawled away, leaving the world to its silent thoughts, once again.