A haunting, evocative piece. I have no idea if the world is actually full of so-called ‘diner goths’, but the author does a great job of building an image of a certain type of person.

The breakup was sudden. Her reasoning was incoherent to the point where I am not even sure she understood her own feelings, but buried in the jumble of justifications was an insinuation that I was too much of a yuppie for her. This was indeed a disconnect — I worked in tech, she worked at a vape shop; she liked the simple things in life and I had cosmopolitan intellectual pretensions; I lived by status gradients that I couldn’t admit, and she just existed in cozy downward mobility. Only later did I realize that our breakup wasn’t unusual for her. It was how things tended to end.

(Via audrey snow matzke)