Overheard and Overthought....

"...meanest thing anybody ever said to me." 

That kept replaying in her head as she went about her day. What was it? She hated missing the first part of the conversation. What could be the meanest thing that was ever said to the woman in the coffee shop? She looked so very put together. One of those women you automatically assigned a whole life story to just based on her shoes. 

Or at least she did.

They were great shoes. 

That's the problem with overhearing conversations. You never get all of it and you cannot just ask for more information. Because you were eavesdropping after all. Even if it was unintentional eavesdropping, it was still eavesdropping. But she really wanted to ask. 

What was the meanest thing anybody ever said to the woman with the great shoes? Then she wondered what was the meanest thing anybody ever said to her? 

Was there a meanest thing?

There had to be. Right? There had been a lot of mean things. Not that she had a terrible life, but everyone gets mean things said to them. Especially while you are growing up. Kids say mean things to each other all of the time. And some of those certainly stick. She still didn't wear green since Kathy McCallistar told her it made her look like a stalk of celery. Rotten celery.

Even worse were the mean things adults said to you. Careless as much as mean really. Not remembering the weight that their words carried in young minds. There was the dance instructor that recommended she try her hand at writing. Years later she entertained the idea that it was actually a compliment about her imagination, but at 7 she had assumed it was the instructor's way of implying she couldn't dance. And it could have been either really. She wasn't exactly graceful.

But were those the meanest things?

She remembered some times in high school and in college being devastated by something someone said. Though she was hard pressed to remember what was said. Just that at the time it had seemed devastating. Pints of ice cream and crying dramatically in her dorm room. But those couldn't be the meanest things since she couldn't recall what they were right? Even the things she did remember she couldn't remember why they had been so devastating at the time. 

She tossed the thought around in her head all day. What was the meanest thing? Was there a meanest? Would her meanest and the woman with the great shoes be similar? Whose would be meaner? Surely the woman with the shoes has the meanest thing said to her because it stuck out. 

She was in the grocery store when she remembered. 

It bobbed up out of the place she had buried it so long ago. 

That denial graveyard we all have in our heads. The forgetting place. The ignore it and it will go away section of her thoughts. 

But it was always there. She should have never disturbed that area. 

She could even still hear his voice. 

The casual way he said it as he got up from the table. 

He didn't even realize he was being mean. 

Just tossed off a comment and got up to go to the bathroom.

She could remember how it had made her stomach clench. The blood drain from her face. Her hand grow cold. She hadn't cried. Not right then. It had been too shocking really. 

By the time he returned to the table she had gone. Thrown what she had hoped was enough money at the bartender to cover her tab and fled. She could still remember the feeling of the world starting to close in around her. 

.....

.....

.....

"Ma'am? Do you need help finding something?"

"What? Oh...no. Sorry, just lost in thought for a moment."

The meanest thing anyone ever said to her?

The truth.

The truth was the meanest thing anyone ever said to her.