Returns

The regular bar is quiet on a Monday afternoon, before it's socially acceptable to drink, before it's socially acceptable to fall apart, but you've tried to keep it together long enough, you've washed your hands a million times. A shot grows in your arm, a spring grows in the window, he takes the check from your outstretched hand and you begin to believe these floors will be yours, begin to believe there are gems in the quicksand, even if you have yet to imagine you could deserve them. 

I step inside, into the empty space, write down my name, how many in my party (what a foul pun, I think), record temperature, wash my hands. Take the table in the windowat least, she says, and I realize my old table in the corner is gone. I've just gotten used to it, she says, pouring the order she knows you're about to utter, forget it was ever any other way. You remember asking for just one good thing in the year that passed and begin to wonder if maybe this wasn't it. A living room at the other end of the block. The bartender lights incense. The playlist has changed. Darker, but maybe more earnest. 

Perhaps the same can be said for all of us. I spend half my time battling demons now, but in the short spaces between, am I not gifted reprieve of the most gentle kind, am I not gifted caresses the kind only New York offers? A slight magic, a nod of recognition, the space of singing along quietly in a bar that feels like home, one day I wrote a few words that felt right and hot damn if I didn't live off those words an entire lifetime, don't

tell me that drug won't
see us through.