Maiden Voyage

Today's Fiction Free Write:

Mimi Maiden didn't fear being alone. She feared being forgotten.

In the heart of Cambridge, Mimi sat at a table that wobbled in the corner of a coffee shop. It was the second day of her first trip to Boston. She loved being in a new place. In fact, her lifestyle bordered on nomadic. New places meant new cities to explore, new people to meet, and new adventures to be had.

Mimi talked to strangers.

The music student she met at breakfast told her that the coffee shop was a favorite of Yo-Yo Ma. Perhaps he would shuffle in with his cello in tow. Mimi wondered what he ordered. Had other famous people sat in the same chair where she now sat? Were there great and famous people among the crowd of coffee drinkers tucked into seats around the room at that very moment? It was possible. And the possibilities - in each destination, in a chance meeting on the street, in the world of the person she might meet there - made new places exciting.

A man in rumpled pants paused at the door of the coffee shop. The middle buttons on his dress shirt strained against his protruding belly. He puffed and sighed, pushed the door open, and walked out to the corner. A gust of wind lifted the gray strands of hair from the balding crown of his head. With his index finger, he pushed his spectacles above the bridge of his nose and looked to cross the street. Mimi thought he might be a professor - a troubled, fidgety Ivy League professor caught in the depths of his own mind - like her father. Preoccupied. Distracted. Perhaps he drank coffee to spike his already high-powered brain with caffeine energy to fuel his ongoing research for the next major publication or the cure for cancer or the economic theory that would solve poverty.

One had to be great to be an Ivy League professor, but greatness was difficult to tolerate in a father. Although Mimi followed her father into academia, she vowed not to neglect her family in the process. Mimi’s father had been distant, surrounded by books and ideas and an ego impenetrable to the simple interests of a young girl.

When she used to go to Lucy’s house in the afternoons, Mimi saw how a father might be in the world beyond the pressures of tenure. Lucy’s dad set up the paint sets and showed them color charts, art books, and stencils. He even sat at the newspaper-covered table with them and took a brush to exercise his own creativity. He admired Lucy’s work - and Mimi’s - telling them they could be the next great painters. He said they could do anything they set their minds to do, anything in the world. It was good to hear that from a grown up, from a dad. Mimi’s mother often told her the same thing in a vague way, but Mimi longed to hear it from her father. He reached the pinnacle of a profession that was also his passion. She wished her father would tell her that she could do anything. She wanted him to believe in her, in all of the possibilities that were her future. She wanted him to convince her that she could be great.

Instead, Mimi's ache for possibilities led her to new places, to seek greatness in simplicity, to explore the world around her until she was certain that if any person could rise from obscurity - from the millions of people doing millions of things - then she, too, could rise.