Satellite

I saw her sitting in a maroon Dodge Colt. I was stopped at a red light on my way to work and she was parked in the lot of a Speedy Auto Glass. Both the street and the lot were otherwise deserted. She was alone in her car with her head down on the steering wheel. At first I thought FSOW – female slumped over the wheel, a sign of either a major medical problem or a drunk driver passed out in the car. Then she looked up and I saw she was crying. I looked away and when the light changed I drove away.

I thought a bit about her later. She looked to be about 20 years old. Why was she crying? Did she just break up with her boyfriend? Did her husband get arrested and she didn’t have enough money to bail him out? Did the Office of Children’s Services take custody of her kids? Did she just find out she was pregnant? Did she have a miscarriage? Did she get fired from her job? Did she find out that the man of her dreams was cheating on her? Did she just tell her parents that she was a lesbian and they kicked her out of the house? Had someone died? Had she lost a pet? Was she super hormonal or clinically depressed or sleep deprived and had just burst into tears for no reason?

The trick is that I’ll never know. I thought of a song by Elvis Costello:

She looked like she learned to dance from a series of still pictures
She's madly excited now, she throws her hands up like a tulip
She looks like an illustration of a cocktail party
Where cartoon bubbles burst in the air,
champagne rolls off her tongue like a second language
And it should have been her biggest night
The satellite looks down on her as she begins to cry

All over the world, at the very same time, people sharing the same sorrow
As the satellite looks down, her darkest hour is somebody's bright tomorrow…

~