Anonymity

He sat alone in a group of four. Just another face, another body, another customer who regretted spending as much as he did for a stale brownie covered in ice cream. He'd met the woman before, but neither remembers a conversation having taken place. The child, of course, he'd never seen before. She sat on the other side of the table and tried to read Harry Potter until she decided that the dialogue taking place across the table was not too dense for her to contribute from time to time. His best friend sat directly opposite him, completely engrossed in a conversation with the woman. His friend, too lost in what was being said to pay him much mind, merely glanced at him when he chose to speak or when his friend felt embarrassed by his attempts to entertain the little girl when her interest flagged and she sat somewhat forlornly watching the others. Two plates, five glasses, and two coffee mugs rested--mostly forgotten--in no-man's-land at the center of the table.
The tables around them were occupied by an assortment of middle-aged and elderly rednecks as well as teenagers dressed too meticulously casually to be missed had not every other teenager there been wearing the same thing.
He listened to the woman beside him telling them of her theatre class at his friend's old high school. She elaborated on her hatred of the job and the difficulty of dealing with her students' attitudes and somewhere in the greasy air above her right eyebrow, he caught a fleeting, but stunningly clear image. Every tired old man, every wrinkled and folded old lady, every gussied up, grunged down teenager, every disheartened teacher like the women beside him was nothing more than a fish trying desperately to find a hold on the sides of a glass tank. Some had stopped trying to get out. Some of them floated on their backs in the middle of the increasing pile of the middle class amidst minimum wages and fallen dreams; watching with wide, unmoving eyes as others who refused to accept their plight leaped and fell and tried and failed.
He blinked and the image vanished back into the inner recesses of his mind. He looked around at all the drinking, eating, laughing, smoking customers and despaired. "I'm not like you!" he screamed deep in his mind. "I will find a way out! I will not fail."
He turned away from these thoughts in sorrow, knowing that those would be his last words.