Bootleg

The bill doesn’t add up, you remember whiskey shots and unknown friends along the sticky bar, everything smells of cigarettes and a time before polish. You revel in everything, taking deep gulps of a life so different from what you have all been offered in this your Golden age. The night grows late, you know you are meant to write the pages, do the work, go to bed on time and namaste into the mat but here is an anodyne better than medicine. 

You want to tell him all about it, know just how well your banter would fit along the bar, see how everything would make sense between the two of you but that was in the Before times and nothing is now as it was. 

You go to bed in a sweltering apartment, ask your super to turn it down but he’s busy washing your car to make up for his own inadequacies, we are all working through whatever we arrived with it’s a ruse, the journey is never over. 

You walk into the unknown with hope, at last

and it is all you could have asked for, now.