Physical Damage Inflicted Upon My Lips Due to the Attack of My Thoughts

     I could nearly taste the blood inside my mouth as I was writing down table 221’s drink order. The skin on the inside of my lips was wedged between my teeth and I could feel it breaking little by little. It hurt, but it hurt a good hurt. I couldn’t stop biting the skin. I presumed it was the habitually nervous result of my trying to handle a large combination of unpleasant elements that were gnawing at my insides.

     And I was failing pathetically.

     My mind was so distant from the spot I was standing in. Physically, I was in the restaurant. I was in my dirty jeans and black t-shirt, standing before a table of two people, a man and a woman in their 30’s, holding a notebook and a pen. My feet were grounded hard against the floor and I subtly shifted back and forth to ease the pain that my own weight was bearing upon me. Physically, I was trying to look pleasant. And wholesome. Physically, I was speaking in a voice that became additionally high pitched as I had to fake more and more my congeniality.

      But mentally. Emotionally. I was out in a field someplace, not even sure myself quite where I was, but I was floating around out there, physically a little lighter than I am now, but bearing more weight. Mentally, emotionally, I was half running from and half fighting back to all the thoughts that were violently attacking me.

     And I was failing pathetically.

     For one, there were all the awful things going on in my at-home life. On top of the struggles of desperately needing to get a new car, pay bills, rent, and hold onto my wages, I was also thinking about my 20th birthday which was vastly approaching, and how badly I did not want to see it come. I was thinking about Paul, how he had wanted to call it quits for awhile and then changed his mind. That was really throwing me off. And my mom and I not speaking after that atrocious argument over the phone several days ago.

      I felt very lonely. I felt a major hole where my support handles normally were and it was not doing wonders for my at-work-attitude.

     Then of course, my boss had been breathing down my neck for the last several days. After being shopped at 85%, all the years and years of hard work, dedication, and loyalty I had put towards the company clearly meant peanuts to him. I tried to explain to him that there was no chance that it had really taken me 5 minutes to greet those guests like they wrote in the report, but he refused to take my side. And although I wasn’t punished like previous servers had been in the past for such a low score, it was humiliating (in a way that I didn’t make public) when he called me out like that in front of everyone.

     Finally, I was dealing with a very large number of grouchy customers tonight, old folk mostly, and all of them ready and anticipating my every error.

     It was all I could do to resist the strong temptation burning inside me to rip my hair out, cry at the top of my lungs and throw something just to hear it shatter. The bite marks in my lips were just a literal translation of how much I was ‘biting my tongue’ throughout the night. A translation of how I was swallowing my frustration and covering it up with the mandatory smile.

     I burst into the ladies room when I finally had a spare minute and locked myself into the handicapped stall, intentionally to cry. But I didn’t cry. I pressed my back to the wall and stared blankly for some amount of time that I didn’t really keep measure of. Just stared. When I realized that my mentality was still in work mode, one that was too robust for tears at the time, I pulled my phone out of my apron. I flipped it open and to my unfazed disappointment, I hadn’t missed any calls and no text messages were going unanswered. Perhaps the most unpleasant feeling I felt all night shivered through my veins. So I pushed myself up and glowered into the mirror.

     I stared some more.

     I was still biting my lip and my expression was more glum than I intended to look. My top lip was pursed and curled in, so it looked like I almost didn’t have one, and the right corner of my lip was pulled in towards the center of my mouth. It made the whole lower part of my face look slightly crooked. My eyebrows pulled together in a very subtle but disturbed-looking way and the expression in my eyes was a tired cross between frustrated and dead. It was the face I made when I was focused hard on something that was bothering me. This face didn’t normally attend work..

      It was clean though, and unlike most nights the make-up still stuck, which was a surprise because I felt like I had been working doubly as hard to do the work that was normally half as easy on most days. Seeing that my make-up hadn’t smudged meant that I was probably not getting too much done. Pity.

     My hair was pulled back in a low maintenance ponytail and the newly-chopped layers felt light against my face. I liked them because they covered the gigantic bruise that was (for the time being) my left cheekbone and it quieted the interrogations of  “What‘s that?! What happened to your face?”
At least for awhile.

      And it didn’t so much bother me that people really didn’t believe I had run into a tray, it was more the horror of realizing how scripted and pitiful I sounded when I was really telling the truth this time.

      It brought back the memories of those days when they pointed it out and when they stared, and I knew now that no one probably ever believed my stories back then, no matter how much I tried to.

      I realized that I had failed pathetically.

    I shook the thoughts away, angry that I had even let them enter at all, and washed my hands for some amount of time that was too long. I dried them beneath four paper towels, gave a dirty look into the mirror and pushed on back to work.