Tomorrow and Probably the Day After

And you step back for a moment and see.

You breathe and are alive and you will be tomorrow, and probably the day after and those days could be worse days or better days, but they are days. Laid out in front of you and waiting. Waiting for you to figure out just what the fuck you're going to do with them. You know the choices. You feel them. They bite into you and gnaw and chew and tear in you just like me and everyone we know and that is being alive too. An ever-unfurling red carpet of time, the comfort of mediocrity, the constant regret. We know the carpet ends at the door. We know we stride quicker and quicker toward it. Under the eyes of everyone we know and love, and do they speak of our failings or success'? Our growth or stagnation? Our deeds... Or not at all? Do the lights shine on us? Why do they why don't they? Why do they why don't they?

Which is worse?

What am I doing with myself?

I'm hunched over a dark table in the back of Del Franco's, an Italian bar where they serve wine and spaghetti and whiskey and spaghetti and whatever and whatever. I'm scribbling in a pocket notebook something I'll never type up and tapping my finger against a glass of the house Cabernet and I have survived the end of the world. Well, the end of whatever mine was anyway.

I drink from my glass and motion toward the bartender. He's an older man. He wears a black vest against a white shirt even though I am sure the dress code doesn't require it. He tends bar and he knows it and he's okay at it and he'll die someday and he'll have been a bartender. I won't have been a writer. I won't have been a husband. I won't have been anything besides alive and then not. My eyelids are heavy. I'm not tired. I'm only getting comfortable. I don't want to leave the table. I want the darkness outside forever and I want to write a masterpiece and then never write again and I want wine and a beautiful woman and I never want to know her name and I want the beautiful woman I know to cry for me and over me and miss me and love me and she won't and the bartender comes to the my table. The night is slow for him.

"What can I get for you James?"

"More wine."

"No problem. Right on the tab?"

"Please."

"Sure."

He disappears for a moment and I stare at the utter garbage I have scribbled out and turn to a blank page. I am running out of blank pages and I need a new notebook and I can't help but spot the goddamned metaphor. I still wear my ring.

I turn it with my thumb. Smooth and warm and I know I'll have to give it up someday. I can't today or any day soon, I imagine. 

Before I had always thought I'd be ready. Okay with it all. There were so many things that had bothered me about her and our life and I  remember thinking "if this keeps up...", as if not getting fucked for two months was some crime against humanity. Pacing through the house, silent and agitated.

"What's wrong?" she would ask.

"Nothing," I would say. You always read that talking shit out in a relationship was helpful. That it would bring you to solutions easier and that you'd have a deeper understanding of your partner. I had taken to shutting myself in and letting shit boil until it burst out of me in a long drunken drive home where I'd lay every petty nonsense fucking issue out on the line and offer no mercy in accusations and brutality. That's what I was. Brutal. A cunt. 

I had to be. I thought it then (and assumed later I wouldn't) and I thought it now. There was no talking to her.   There was no insinuating or stating or reporting anything wrong. What wasn't met with unfiltered anger ended in "compromises" that ultimately led to nowhere. I saved more money and we got nicer things and we went to dinner and bought new clothes and she still thought it was okay to berate me and belittle me and not fuck me and I thought it was better to keep my goddamn mouth shut. I regret thinking about it. There had to be a moment before it all twisted into that fucking knot where I had slipped. Where I could have been better. Where I could have said the right thing at the right time and I could have saved it all.

Ten years down the drain. 

The bartender came back with a bottle of Chianti. "We are out of the house Cabernet, so I brought this Chianti. On the house."

"Really? Why?"

He smiled and pulled the cork out and filled my glass. "I'll be closing up soon."

"Okay."

He walked away and I stared down at the blank page. I had nothing. Nothing that mattered or spoke or meant a goddamned thing. I drank the glass of Chianti and poured another. I had passed the drunken level of creativity and wandered into self pity and regret and I knew if I kept going I'd kill myself on the way home. I needed to get laid. The bar was empty and I drew squares and circles on the page in my notebook and gave them faces and when the bottle was gone I got up and waved to the bartender and left and walked home to my apartment. 

I had moved away from her and I had heard she moved even further and my apartment was cold. I left my clothes on and went to bed and thought that I'd be alive tomorrow and probably the day after.