2/28

I’m at a bar with a co-worker.  We decided to meet up for a few beers and plan out the week ahead of us.  Manage the perpetual onslaught of coffee orders coming our way.  But we don’t spend too long discussing vocational duties.  

Once we’re on our second pints we’re speaking more of family relations and odd social interactions.  Of his mother in-law’s manipulative boyfriend.  Or of the guy that I tailed up the highway after he cut me off yesterday morning.  Things like that.

We step outside for a cigarette and I shiver in the night’s brisk air.  Fixate on the clouds of grey seeping out of my face.

Back inside he heads for the restrooms at the back of the restaurant, and I return to the bar.

As I sit, sipping away at my pint, the bartender stands before me rinsing dishes in the sink wells beneath the bar.  With her short brown bob swaying as she bends and rises, eyeing the patrons seated at the hightop tables for empty drinks or needful expressions, I shout her name.

Through the music and cacophony of conversations her gaze settles on mine and she smiles, courteously.  “How are we doing?”

“I’m alright,” I say and raise my beer.  She glances at the glass in my hand, then her eyes are off scanning the room again.  Looking to utilize her services.  But I still want her attention, so I ask, “How are you?  How are your classes?  You said you were taking astronomy courses last time I was here.”

And for a moment, I feel as though I’ve succeeded.  As her arms stop plunging and scrubbing, and her wandering blue eyes come back to me.  Settle once again on mine.  But slowly a certain vitality melts from her face and she lets out such a rattled sigh that I feel a jab in my stomach.  A painful twang through my inebriated carelessness.

Her shoulders slump as she begins to speak.  As she tells me how the value of the credits she’s obtaining aren’t transferring to the university she’s decided to attend.  How it looks as though she’ll have to choose another major, and how the future is revealing itself to be something particularly more cumbersome than planned.  How that’s becoming more of a normalcy lately.

My head is cradled in my arms as I lean over the bar.  As I’m sucked into the disenchantment growing around this lady’s life.  

When I open my mouth to ask about her kids, how they’re doing, what they’re getting into these days, my co-worker appears behind me with a heavy handed slap on the back and the moment passes.  She’s off running someone’s tab and I’m slouched in my seat listening to a story of how some dude is currently vomiting in the men’s bathroom.