Who You Are And Where You Belong

I miss the mutant food court.

I miss the homeless guy in the corner eating his club sandwich and stroking his thick, scratchy beard.

I miss the stairs and the way they creaked on the way down but not on the way up--perhaps a kind of alerting system for the mutants as to detect intruders.

I miss the table I always sat at and the cryptic poetry scribbled all over it in ink so thick that even after years of being there it still got on your arms.

I miss the little old lady at the juice bar that no one ever went to.

I miss the walls with the peeling paint, the floors with the deep, black scuffs, and the windows that looked out over nothing at all.

But most of all I miss the companionship. I miss the simple fact that none of us really belonged there. Despite the fact that we were all outsiders we always came back. Maybe we just wanted to see that the place was still there. Maybe we needed to know that there was somewhere in the world just for us. But maybe, just maybe, the reason we always came back was to see those we knew would always be there. To see the people who we might never have seen--who might never have existed--if we hadn't peered down into the darkness and decided to find out what was below. But we knew. We all knew. What we would find--what we all eventually found--was the one thing we always knew was there.

And I miss it.