Waiting For The Next Big Thing
I’m from the North Hills, which is twenty minutes or so outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It is suburbia, folks, and you can’t get away from it. It is not the country, but definitely not the city either. And at age nineteen, I am stuck here like a piece of chewing gum in my little brother’s hair. It can be pretty, the grass and the trees and the strip malls. But one tends to get bored easily, so I rely on my ‘people-watching’ abilities. I know you have heard of ‘bird-watching’, so I can compare ‘people-watching’ to ‘bird-watching’. I sit down in a restaurant, a store, on a bench, in a public restroom, and notice how people act. I hear amazing love stories and horrible tragedies. I meet a bunch of people that have no story, besides the one I supply. You would be amazed at the type of inhabitants of this area.
I was in Starbucks yesterday, and I was going about my people-watching, as usual. Behind me was a group of middle school students who were enjoying a celebratory breakfast with their classmates before the last day of school.
“And then SHE said to me that it didn’t matter what we did so long as we did it, and I told her she better chill because it’s the last week of school and then she retracted her claws!”
The group of three girls and one boy laughed. A second boy joined the group and was greeted with a ‘hey, hottie!’ He wasn’t that attractive. I was watching these thirteen-year-olds sitting around, putting up their masks and pretending they were greater and more secure than they really were. When the parental units entered the scene, reminding them of their commitment to one final day of school before three months of freedom – the seventh graders blushed with embarrassment. How dare their mother act like she KNOWS her son and his friends? How embarrassing. Total social suicide. What a way to start the summer.
The business men on the couch next to them hardly noticed the mother’s social blunder. “It’s hard,” the thirty-something man in a navy blue suit explains to his elder, who dawns a gray blazer. After a sympathetic nod, the younger man continued, “this constant hiding and lying and denying that there is anything wrong. You would think someone would come up with a ‘no strings attached’ system for carrying on an affair.” The older man stared at him long and hard before asking in a quiet voice, “are you breaking up with me?”
A loud crash from the display table made the father of a sweet looking imp, cringe. He dragged his daughter, who looked to be just under schooling age, up to the front with one hand, while holding the remains of a broken mug in the other. “Hand the nice lady the money, Olivia.” His impatience could not be masked by his sweet tone. Olivia started to cry and her father handed the cashier the money himself. He bought her a cookie, told her accidents happen, and at least there was no hot coffee in the cup like the LAST time she broke one. She laughed and hopped onto her father for a piggyback ride to the car.
There was one lone girl, who was almost a woman, sitting by herself at one of those very small round tables that barely fits two people, but Starbucks tries anyway, just to make it look like there is more seating. The result is a cluttered look, more than anything. She watched everything around her, and was taking mental notes. She was bored to tears and sucked into the other people’s lives that she had been watching, all at the same time. She drank an over-priced ice coffee, and looked as though she was waiting for the next big thing. No one spoke to her, though she made eye contact with everyone. They could feel her nonchalant stare. She should have been out having her own life, instead of living vicariously through others just to write it down later. Everyone sees her quietly observing their lives and no one speaks to her, no one invites her in, and no one knows why she is there. I know why she is there. She is there to build a character for a role she will play on stage some day. She is there to gain writing material. She is there to learn about her surroundings in ways others care not to. They know where they live, they wave hello to their neighbor, and never know their children’s teachers. She does not want to become that. She wants to know the people that live around her so personally, she could finish their sentences. She wants them to read this, and see that they are noticed. She wants to break the mold.
And all the while, these caffeine consuming, time managing, private lives citizens of the North Hills, just twenty minutes outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, assume it’s just another day around town.
