It's 3am on Christmas Eve, and this woman at Mickey's Diner in St. Paul is getting me down. She's 50ish, wearing long, gold ribbons in her hair, and she's fancily dressed in black velvet with a white faux fur coat. Also, she's alone. And also, she's three sheets to the wind.

I try to focus on the menu, but I can't. Slumped at the bar, she talks to herself. When she stands to hang up her coat, I look away, but watch her in the mirror as she fumbles with it, hanging and re-hanging it on different hooks, seven or eight times, before finally persuading it to stay put. The whole process makes me want to cry.

When I give my order to the waitress -- coffee and a one-eyed jack -- I'm barely paying attention, distracted by the thought of this woman and what her story might be. "I can't find my keys..." she says to no one, digging in her purse, forgetting her keys when she finds her lipstick, which she applies until the radio begins to play "Feliz Navidad," which she sings and dances to until it is finished. It's her night, I decide. She's celebrating.

I see her husband dying on Christmas Eve seven years ago or maybe more. He, the one true love of her life. She just wakes up and he's gone. And everyone was terrific at first when the grief was fresh, bringing over food and making sure she was OK, but people tire of that sort of thing pretty quickly. Now, faced with a dark house and disturbing memories, she's made Christmas Eve into her own special night. She's been out on the town, carousing, though all night just like right now, no one paid much attention. Tomorrow she'll be haunted by the demons of Headache, Nausea and Emptiness. Merry Christmas indeed.

Is it the smell of hash browns on the grill that make her wrinkle her nose in disgust? Or has she caught a few words from the conversation between the two college girls on my left? Making out and hooking up, parties and other points of bragging rights among young people with low self-esteem. These two women -- the one talking loudly about her latest exploits, the other sadly swaying to the tinny Christmas music -- two women on opposite ends of the same spectrum of experience.

She was young once, too, this Christmas queen in her gold ribbons, and you can see the attractiveness in the bones of her face, her taste in clothes. The boys turned their heads when she walked into a room, and it was something she took for granted, a part of her happiness she thought would be there forever. But nothing is forever. And here she sits, alone and drunk in her party clothes, in a cheap diner on Christmas Eve.

My girlfriend, not entirely aware of all these thoughts in my head, rises and walks over to get a key for the bathroom, when the woman speaks to her, saying, "What're you, Ugly Betty? You might be actually cute if you weren't wearing that hat." At this, Christa laughs heartily.

And here is where I finally realize that all of this history, all of this sadness, is entirely in my own head. We are two-thirds of the way to Rochester and it's three in the morning. For the past hour, I've been listening to the fuzzy AM car radio fade in and out while watching the lines on the highway dash by. I don't know this woman at all.

She probably started out at a Christmas party and ended up here via three or four bars, and that isn't anything I haven't done many times over. Even this is speculation.

By the time my sandwich arrives, I'm feeling much better. There's still the rest of the drive to Rochester ahead, but I'm refueling, re-energizing, and best of all, no longer randomly saddened.

It's times like this that make me realize what a touchy thing the brain is.