Oh my god-or ,Clair de Lune

Last night I purchased about thirty five dollars and sixty seven cents of itemss from Wall Mart. People have made volumes of observations about the people that are attracted by the items that trickle off the shelves of that famous place. I bought, bungees, motor oil, a tee shirt, a grommet making kit and a top up card for a mobile phone. I saw a girl with her father in the check out corrals. I recognized the couple from a holiday gathering some years before. I held a conversation with the dad around the kitchen sink about her middle school experience and how it wasn't going well. About how she was getting teased to the point she had developed a twitch in her eye. Maybe it wasn't the same people. I didn't want to be recognized but there were only two isles open. One of them was processing a tweekie redneck youth with a lice cut and soiled ball cap. He would know for sure that I had voted for Obama. I took my chances on genetic vagueness, required of all aspiring Intelligence agents, and filed in behind the slightly familiar Italians from my past. The dad was pacing the check out isle as I compressed into the impulse chute behind him. She unloaded their basket. He was apologizing in a way that sounded routine, to someone who might be in a position to help pay their rent. She shuffled around him framing their purchases on the conveyor with choreographed movements. I mirrored her movements and a gaze put her age at seventeen and seven eighths of a year old. She was wearing out a tween sized jade "wife beater". Her skin was olive but looked yellow and chalky under the market halogen lights. Her hair was dark and naturally ashy with sun. It looked like she had just taken out a rubber band because the strands had a uniformed bend in them about half way down her crown/skull. She wore the type of sweat pants that could be pajamas and her sandals were silver lamé and split her big toe from the little ones. Her toes were dirty. As she left I looked at her eyes and they were black and shiny like polished coal. The glance she shot back in reflex was a doppler effect of butter carved bandits melting in curious high noon. Maybe she was slightly use to the attention, just not at Wally World, postmortem on a sunday. I considered the flasks for sale at calf level while matching the granny clerks greeting of systemically wrote concern for my condition, customary in these parts.
Waking into Mondays routine I was reminded of a friend who disappeared. He was a very stable person who worked at a bank during the day. The story he told me was that he had just extended his generosity to his step daughter as the girls mother was an addict and of no use. I think slowly he was drawn into her world. The pills were bought and shared along with the "good" times. Off and on for a year, I would see this man. Then one day hoo ray! He was gone. I speculate, and I imagine how I would console him over my mixed berry gluten free waffles. I think how I would console him for the guilt I would think he was feeling. This happened about four years ago. Two nights ago I watched the movie seven years in Tibet. They showed how pilgrams in Lhasa would endure self mortification over the course of their journey to atone for their sins. Sometimes the shapes between the words is more fascinating than the words themselves.