Veselka 3:49AM

It's rainy and cold on the Lower East Side.
The streets are empty except for the bottle pickers and the awning hoppers.
With no umbrella but a head full of ingenuity I grab a crushed card board box from someones neat stack of recycling and use it to escape the drizzle.

The coffee is weak and hot as hell, the challah soft and the borscht is perfectly tepid.
The yellow sponge soaks up the rich magenta.
The chunks of beef melt in my mouth and the pink tinted Lima beans give it texture.

I've limited my dairy intake. So i only butter one slice of bread. It makes me appreciate the oily slipperiness, the creamy sweetness that coats my lips.

One worker talks about losing 12 pounds to the night shift.
The G train has been real messed up you know?
I get home so late I just go to sleep then wake up for work.
I weighed myself after one week on this shift- 12 pounds I had lost.

I order two more slices of bread. I succumb to another packet of butter.

From where I sit I can see the staircase which leads to the office upstairs.
I remember once going up there and feeling the sense of privilege.
AS Tom, the owner, and my parents talked, I peered through the decorative cuts into the slatted railing down at the customers.
They buzzed about unaware of my eyes looking down into their glasses of water, their plates of pie or pirogi, their dishes of stroganoff and soup. Looking over their shoulders, down on their heads, studying their postures and gestures.
I took deep breaths and thought about those people. They could not see my young quizzical nosey eye peering at them cutting their meatloaf watching their every motion they made sipping their coffee.
But there I was watching.
I'm sure the next morning when I came in for my scrambled egg on a roll- my eyes darted to that fenced office. I'm sure I wondered who was looking back down at me.

I feel a sense of pride sitting here at the counter.
No one here would remember that skinny six year old with bright blue eyes and shiny pink shoes.
But I know her. She's still sitting at the counter. A little taller. A little bigger. Still looking down at the top of the world's head. Studying life's movements from a distance.

The rain has stopped now. But I'm too tired for walking. My body just returned from a journey several years to the past.