A bartender; a bartender is not your friend or your brother, or your confidant, or your television screen. But it feels like it sometimes, and if that vision in front of you cooperates with your dreams, it makes the line become a square. but a bartender, and this one who is a thousand, yet still my own, who has the most amazing cheeks and hipline and quips and eye contact and stories and teeth and SMILE and, well, tactical smile. and personality and “personality” and discounts and gifts and just the act like she really cares about my reaction to her stab at consistency in nicknames for me, me being the occasional bar patron. A bartender who solidified my attention more than the drinks did. A bartender was had, named [sonya].
A bartender was lost. I visited only sporadically, mostly Sundays, when she worked. And then I was out of town a lot, not drinking a lot, but thinking still of her a lot, doubting my thoughts of her as much as I doubt my own sense of sex. I keep going in now, seeing other people, people who can’t mix drinks well, people who focus on themselves and their own shitty ironic tattoos, people who focus on their own relationships as if we give a shit what came before. “It’s my birthday next week, and I’M WORKING…of course! I’ll be TWENTY-FIVE! Well, it’s ok, I’m single now, and I haven’t been single since I was 15. Yeah…” From her I ordered a gin drink that was weak and tasted of sugar. She poured another for a separate customer, the lead bartender saw it, took it back, made another. A song came on that I didn’t like. I was polite and I paid, and I just realized what I had taken for granted.
The walk uphill: 8 blocks of steep sidewalk leading from the Broadway bar to a more comfortable place on 15th. The wood in this bar has a dull glisten that is perhaps more perceptible to our skin and arm hair and breath than it is to our eyes. The rubber of my feet met sidewalk continually, skidding often for feel. I was very comfortable in the night air, the place and sense of direction; the more at home I feel in a walk is the more I feel I’m in a dome, even the atmosphere seems closer and more attainable. I stated years ago while in the depths of home: ‘my room feels like my skin, and this town feels like my room’. I don’t think I want to feel that again, because it feels like a betrayal of the moment I had. Yet I can’t go back, because I no longer feel that same sense of home in that exact place. Seattle is a shell of a city, but the alienation of change keeps me comfortable.
The fucked up thing is that I wanted that bartender so bad that I couldn’t show any affection whatsoever. The fucked up thing is that I can’t even call the friends that I want to talk to the most because a phone conversation just won’t cut it. The messed up thing is that I censor myself out of the consideration of no one. The thing is that I don’t care enough to keep up any kind of drive for preference, and I actually think that’s beautiful, reconciling, a return to an all-we-have.
[I can’t write what I think. I can only write what I feel. I get lost in the night scene, drink to sleep, wake up with coffee and find myself staring out of the kitchen window.]
Twisted naked tree branches sprint out of main trunk, at a much darker rate than sky behind. Sky is dark as far as sky is concerned, but still much lighter than the tree. The rapid and overbearing tree limbs spray out until the window’s threshold stops them with a clean off-white barrier. The light from above slowly filters into the window, lying on drapes and table, but steadily declines with the drink upon such surface. The phone rings and throws off the balance of contrast. The wind outside in the natural environment encases ideas of movement, but a thawed inside seats frozen warm muscles. The only fast movement is that of blood, and movement of blood mimics highways, street legs, only a mechanical basis of function, not blue oxygenate to any neuro-chemical center, only the traveled upon routes, just to keep a place awake. Photos cover inside walls, late winter shadows on black and white pictures equate space, not busy, but soft straight layered sugar.
We all want a place that is completely our own.
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