LUDIC LOG

Who is Waitress? Might as well ask who was Buddha, who was Jesus, who was Jack the Ripper.

This was before, before she was Waitress, when she was only waitress, or at the worst of times, "waitress!". No respectful capital ennobled the word, merely a patch to cover the void that was her life. There was no need for a name behind the word. There was no one at home to call her name, and at work the word was enough. So before she was Waitress:

There was nothing to her. No dark history to explicate her crimes; no monster father or shrewish mother, no sister born dead whose phantom nagged at her. Poverty and insanity were extremes to which the blandness of her life simply could not aspire. She spent 27 years being alive but hardly any time at all living -- born and raised within sight of the diner where she worked. Even when she abandoned higher education (a community college less than six miles from her home) and moved away (a dreary, utilitarian apartment complex less than two miles from where she was born), she had no more sense of progression than if she were simply staying overnight at a friend's house.

"Here you go, two coffee, one double deuce plate, one Denver omelet."

"Hey, you goin' to Lisa's party Friday night?"

"I'm working second shift Friday."

"It'll still be going at midnight!"

"Yeah, okay."

No more clues than these. No more insight than its endless variations. No journal, no book of days, no longings secretly expressed. Just a life, marked by neither deprivation nor abundance, its hours passed by work and as little misery as fulfillment: a party, a weekend, a camping trip, a pointless fuck. Only someone who knew her better than she knew herself might have noticed how often she gazed blankly at the freeway which the diner overlooked, watching all the cars and trucks leave town. And no one knew her better than she knew herself; no one knew her at all.