French Revolution
It was something I said that broke the rank and file of emotion. Something about reliability. Her head bowed over her breakfast bowl of oatmeal and berries. There was a pause, and then... tears. I sucked in my breath. Sunlight, missing for the past two days, streamed in the hotel restaurant's dining room. I snatched my napkin from off my lap and deposited it on my empty plate, rose and turned to unleash my purse strap from the back of my chair, lifting it over my head and down to rest on one shoulder, its weight at my hip, weapon-like. We marched single-file and tight-lipped past the black-clad waiters and waitresses who smiled as a reflex. She cried. She cried the tears that are squeezed from the inner-most chambers of the heart. Her personal war story was one of many battles—diagnosis and remission, diagnosis and remission, diagnosis and remission, with life laying siege each time in between. Though her arena differed from our own, the language of the campaign was so much the s