camped on the doorstep of panic

the barista is young and scarred, scared too, her glasses slip down toward the end of her nose like a twenty year old pigtailed granny. a stray lock dangles down her cheek like a curtain that did not complete its fling, flung unfinished, face partially eclipsed. a flock of tiny birds swarm the bell shaped tree across the street from where i sit by the wide window, sipping my notebook on a fudge brown plank of wood, studying the puddles, how light rain lands like an invisible ballerina on the hood of a pine green toyota truck, each drop a cold gentle tap that releases a faint steam from the still warm hood. i watch the barista plead with each customer who orders, tiptoeing along her edge like those old black & white pictures of people building the early skyscrapers, but she's new and not at home in the sky. i think of how many times in my life i've had to survive on that ledge, to live in perpetual trembling, needing to always be that vigilant, tight as a piano string and exhausted by the constant failure of my instrument to stay in tune. never feeling secure enough, afraid to not be afraid is like being homeless with a home, camped on the doorstep of panic. i notice how often she calls for help, raising her already raised voice until it climbs into the thin atmosphere of its peak, where it begins to collapse from the lack of oxygen needed to sustain its summit. i do not want to be kept. i do not wish to be tracked. i am an open secret. the mailman enters wearing a plastic white mushroom cap to protect him from the rain. i walk over to the counter and ask the barista for more hot water to replenish my story. i sit back down and a fashionable young blond woman, straight out of a french movie, perhaps the "umbrellas of cherbourg," saunters past, her lunar face slashed with cherry red lipstick. she pauses furtively on the corner, holding a lemon yellow umbrella, wrapped in a beige shawl, her poultry thin legs stockinged & high heeled. the last leaves on the young, recently transplanted tree across the street are that yellow. a crow alights on the thick black sharpied telephone wire just above me, a half dozen others striping the overcast. i cannot hear the crow's caw above the groovy cafe music played by the owner who is wearing a wonder woman tshirt and spotted white tights, who lingers nearby, arranging cut limbs in a vase. when the barista reaches for my teapot, i can see numerous finger sized bruises spotting her arm in a leopard print of pain, all up and down her milky skin. she is nervous. she is always nervous and very nice.