Location: Glasseye Market Closed: for @sofiapuglisi
It had been a lifelong struggle for Heathcliff to learn how to live with the unpredictability of a human’s schedule. He liked his in an impossible way - right on time, down to a second, everything planned out and nothing unpredictable disturbing it. When he was a child, that could’ve been arranged somehow with the help of his parents, within their own little family bubble and their capabilities to manipulate their family life to revolve around Heathcliff’s comfort. But as he grew up, he began to find out that not everyone regarded a schedule as a set of rules and timetables to live by. They took the time more as a guideline, a loose determiner that could in some cases mean nothing.
So, Heathcliff learned how to adjust and not take it to heart. He didn’t just want to adapt to the world, he wanted to succeed in it and that meant becoming more flexible than he’d naturally care to be. At the end of the day, even his noble work which was under his strict control could not be tied to the promise of certainty every day. A patient could not help bleeding internally for two minutes longer than Heathcliff’s sharp mind had predicted and calculated for, pushing the surgery to break the five hour limit which sent Heathcliff well into overtime. So, to compensate for the time being an elusive, relative element even for the complex human organisms for whom it should be linear and easily grasped, Heathcliff stuck to uncompromising habits instead to soothe the anxiety of not being able to have everything under his control.
So, whenever he could, a grocery shop visit followed on Mondays and Fridays after work. The place conveniently on the way to his duplex in Maple Row, the grocery list memorized because it was always the same and a quiet sense of comfort and satisfaction whenever he’d see familiar faces or pass by familiar landmarks that completed his day. Likewise if a change was noticed, or the script deviated from the usual, it was a cause for grumpiness for the rest of the evening. If Heathcliff could live one day on a loop for the rest of his life, he would be content.
So far, the day went well. As expected. As predicted. As it should be. Heathcliff went up and down the aisles, getting the things from his mental list in order, content that they were in stock, pleased that his dinner today would not be forced to change. Always planning ahead, he stopped by the fresh produce stands, inspecting avocados for tomorrow’s breakfast. That was when a new face had been spotted. An anomaly. An unknown. An unpredictable element. Heathcliff glanced at the young woman to his left out of his periphery, as she was currently taking up the spot of a sweet old grandma who was usually there at this time, taking about ten minutes to pick the best packaging of cherry tomatoes as an excuse to speak to Heathcliff about her grandchildren even though he never asked.
The woman now definitely did not look like she had grandchildren and it was even less likely that someone passed the grandma through a time machine and this was what she looked like when she was young. See, another variable of life, complicating things. Heathcliff returned his attention to the avocados unhappily.