Re: The Widow/The Nothing
She didn't care much for labels, and their nondescript appearance, which would likely be forgotten once all was said and done, was only a passing footnote in their interaction. Men. Women. Elderly. Children. Everything in between and on the margins, she had no place to judge them. They were what they were, and she was what she was, and so long as there was an understanding in that simple fact, she had no complaints to voice.
The absence, too, was another footnote, and maybe in another world, another place, another time, she might have cared to pay more attention, to ask herself why there was something and yet nothing across from her. But this place was more like limbo than reality, another detail that she skimmed over without giving it much pause. As for her and her own situation, she was absent as well, existing in that strange place that grief brought about, a chunk of her heart and soul carved out and buried somewhere in the earth. She was only half there, the color bled from her skin and her clothes and her very person, a faded afterimage of what may have been someone vibrant another day.
"I'm not sure if I'm stuck, or if this is simply where I belong." She skimmed the stem of the wine glass with the tips of her fingers, making as though she might pick up the glass to take a sip, but she then reconsidered, hands flattening upon the table. She may have been a young woman at first glance, but her hands told the real story of her age. These were not the hands of someone young, no. There was a story in them, in the thin skin and scattered wrinkles where age could not lie. But it wasn't a story she was going to be telling tonight.
"I thought I was trying to go some place, but I'm not sure I want to. Not anymore." She raised her eyes, looking over at them from behind the veil. "Yourself? Were you headed somewhere?"