On the patio at Live Organic Food Bar sits a single East Indian woman eating some sort of vegan sushi. <\/p>\n

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Encumbered by a stern resting face, she\u2019s locked like a laser into the world of her iPhone. Forced and slightly unnatural, she makes a point of never glancing around but lives inside her self-constructed bubble bringing small, impulsive miseries upon employees through calls or texts. After about 15 minutes her companion, hurried and apologetic for being late, arrives. The stern-faced woman is passive-aggressive, telling the new arrival that she had no choice but to go ahead and order, and then making unnecessary and pointed noises of completion with her cutlery. She then launches straight into business, a vampire sucking information from her guilty and compliant victim.<\/p>\n

There are two waitresses serving the half dozen or so tables and both of them are lovely. One is tall and thin with a trace of brittleness to her, as if she hasn\u2019t quite found her place in the world and might be looking for some time yet. She wears over-sized, bold glasses meant to add some complexity to the generic beauty queen image she projects\u2014this, something she worries about, you can tell.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

The other one is young and dewy, striding optimistically forward. She\u2019s completely comfortable with who she is, and being good-natured and cheerful is not a mask she puts on when she goes to work\u2014she wants to meet the world exactly where it stands.<\/p>\n

An older woman, over-dressed for the weather, has the long, grey hair of a sociologist. She\u2019s proud of it and considers it a political statement, pulling it into two practical pigtails that she fastens, one with a red band, and one with blue. She\u2019s very particular, almost stubborn in her manner, and when she stands up to dust the crumbs off her placemat and onto the ground, it\u2019s as if she\u2019s beating a carpet out on a clothesline. Efficient, economical and unsentimental, she wants us to see her self-reliance, how she\u2019s always been happy to live alone in this world. A train then trundles by, and everything shakes. Somehow, the patio then seems to dislocate and separate from time for a moment, and the world becomes a little richer, the passing aroma of electricity and oil drifting through us like history.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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