I checked my cell phone again and just set it on the bar. I got tired of pulling it out of my pocket every ten minutes and feeling walls crash inside.
Around me people….no….stories were mingling but it just seemed like one unified background hiss of noise. I wasn’t sure why I was here. Drinking alone was the usual mode in situations like this….but nothing felt right and I watched the Jack and Coke I had ordered instead of using it. The bartender looked at me periodically in anticipation. Nope. Wasn’t happening. None of it. Just like the chance of this working out and her texting me with something that would insult and make me smile at the same time. That was her way of apology. Usually.
Not this time.
Stories, they say, that begin in bars always are tired and convoluted. I would suggest that stories that end up in them, are as well…and that goes for the characters too….like me. In this story I was a caricature of who I thought I was, and it didn’t feel good.
I put money near the glass, grabbed my stuff and left. I needed something or at least to be somewhere.
It wasn’t here.




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