Yesterday's Heartache

I Laugh.

Charlie is genuinely funny. We throw back our heads and chuckle. I like his company again, but now he is always working. He has his Blackberry and it always goes off, breaking the conversation. His thoughts are far away when he isn't talking. He isn't connecting at times, concerned about job issues most likely. I remember being that way. I can't hold it against him. Thinking about the next contract, the next proposal, the next client. It was tough then. I could never relax. He couldn't either.

I sat there alone for a half hour before he could make it, I was there twenty five minutes early, I sat there about a total of an hour, so I had a chance to dream, to let my thoughts float, and they did so, aimlessly. To the myriad faces in the streets, before me in the bay windows before my chair. I watched as they passed, attractive women, still slaves to fashion, dressed seductively, even in the semi-cool night. Men, rugged and intent. Sometimes in boisterous groups, other times alone and smoking a cigarette, striking dangerous poses.

I turned around to look at the faces in Smiths, crowded around the bar, standing around the floor, packed around tables. I regard the bar again, this was MY place during one of my lifetimes. I wasn't a real good guy then. Maybe I was deserving of the life I lead now. The bar was different. The crowd was much more blue collar. Old men bent over smoky drinks, grousing over their past. Not the suit and ties getting off work, grey haired men in their Fifties, dapper and clean with their twenty something assistants sitting next to them nervously. Old hands finding soft tender, supple flesh with every drink bought, envisioning her with her naked legs draped over their shoulders in bed as the evening progresses.

No, these were older men when I frequented here. In their Sixties, Seventies, drinking on their Social Security checks, lined shoulder to shoulder with barflies. You could always tell a roundheeled barfly. She comes in and buys the most inexpensive drink at the bar, and sips on it for an hour. She is waiting for someone to buy her a drink. Everything everyone says is funny, she is constantly getting up and going to the bathroom, walking down the line of men sided up against the bar babbling. These women I would single out and hunt down, must like a lion or a tiger would long legged prey.

We know that sordid story. No need to go into it again. Charlie walks in and we shake and hug. We are brothers after all. Time travels fast, and conversation peters out, and when it's time to go, we both feel it. It was an early night, around 8:00PM. I walk Charlie to the Port Authority and leave him at his bus gate. Then I walk across town to the Western Union and pay my Internet Cable bill, because without that, I'd be way up shit's creek. Way up. I worry one day I will not be able to make the payment. What would happen to me then? Back down to Starbucks early every morning to get on, and stay on, all day long.

There is always an option. Always an option. I wish I knew that before I had to hit the streets. That there was always something that I could do. Something. Other than collapse. But the bottle was my close friend then. He made a lot of the decisions, he cared little for my life and me. All the bottle wanted to do was drink. Pop the top and drink. This is not good. Not at all. But those days are behind me now too. I am a free man.

I get home and try to do a little shopping, but there is nothing that I really want. I head upstairs and strip down. I'm tired. I don't stay up late. I check my e-mails and lie down in bed. I don't drift off right away. I stare at my new screensaver on my computer, constantly changing images of the beach, crashing waves, against white shores. Waves pounding on broken shells of all assorted types. Pounding them to powder. Pounding them to sand.

The waves of life, pounding, pounding, pounding on our souls. Pulverizing us over time, aging us, breaking us down until we are sand, returning to the sea. A great wave slides up, and catches us, and scours us back into the blue green water, carrying us away to our final destination, joining with the billion others before us.

A wave of sleep overtakes me, drawing me under, drowning me in pleasant dreams.

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