How many years has it been since we sat in those two stools on the short side of the bar, back in that dark corner where no one ever wants to sit? We'd had a few beers, everyone had left, and as the sun started to set the enormity of this new endeavor I'd undertaken began to dawn on me and I panicked. But you were there, as you always were, and you sat beside me, as you always did, and you held my hand, which was a first. I don't remember a whole lot these days but I remember exactly what I was wearing, and exactly how my heart beat and my breath caught as I held your hand back. I feel that way still.
Like everyone I have good days and bad, but there are stretches of bad when it feels like the good are all behind me. Oddly those stretches coincide with the flipping of pages on the calendar as days stretch to weeks stretch to months. With you it's flipping a switch; you turn on a light inside me and like all good environmentalists turn it off again when you leave. Correlation or causation I'll not articulate my guess, but how strange to be rendered inanimate when I am constantly squirming.
Do you remember how you used to sit and I used to write like I was painting your portrait? And then one day I stopped writing entirely, the drive and the desire both swept away like broken glass. If I were the person you think of when I'm not around, I would have collected those shards and blown something new. But I am who I actually am, inert, disappointing; sometimes you seem to like me anyway and that's sometimes enough.
Today you sat. And today I wrote. And just for today, it was enough.
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