Free blog for fun- Quintessence- Free writing

“What can I get ya?” The bar tender had a scruffy beard and a once white rag on his shoulder that almost blended in to his caramel-colored t-shirt that stretched to fit over his bulging beer belly. He smacked his gum while he waited for me to order something, anything.

“I don’t know, make it hard.” The bar tender looked at me and knew that he sat exactly where I did, he understood agony. What does taste matter? Just seconds later he slid a glass across the counter that stopped right in front me, the result of countless years stuck inside a tavern, repeating the same thing day after day, all the while promising yourself that tomorrow you’ll move on to bigger and better dreams. I sat and stared at the golden-brown liquid sitting within my reach, knowing that there’s no going back once I take a sip. I heard the bell over the door ring behind me, and a worn man sat a few seats down for me and asks the bartender to give him his favorite.

The barman took out a mixing glass and spoke roughly.

“This is my favorite… a rum daiquiri, a little rough going down though”

“Sweet liquid, it’s been a while.” He seemed to be saying it out loud to herself as a way of justifying the act more than anything else, but I answered anyway.

“Me neither, you know Ernest Hemingway loved the rum daiquiri mix” Both of us kept looking forward in our moments of immense sadness. He spoke again.

“Well, only the best for the best…right?”

I chuckled and slowly grabbed my glass and brought it up to my lips. I could see the elderly man look at me from the corner of my eye.

“What?”

He shook his head

“Oh nothing… do you drink a lot?” I pondered the question for the moment and put the glass down, I could see him smiling.

“No I have never had a drink in my life, but they say it can make you forget”

Minutes passed before the white haired man spoke again, the bartender cleaned glasses as his mind also thought of memories and scenes he wish he could have relived and changed.

“I’d have to drink a whole lot to forgot these past thirty something years”

At that moment a sense of interest overcame me like no other, this man had a lot to say.

“What do you mean, sir?”

He replied quickly “Don’t call me sir” he paused for a moment and brought his drink up to his eyes for inspection. He swirled the drink in his clear glass and smelled the liquor, he then released a depressing sigh.

“I loved this woman with a love that never existed before, I dreamt of her and woke up with her in my mind and I went to work being propelled by the fact that I would see her…” at this point the man’s eyes were shut and his hands were shivering, his frail skin seemed to feel a cold air that didn’t truly exist.

“Go on…” I said

A single tear splashed into his shot.

“And she loved me, we spent every day in a thick bliss, thick like a marmalade teeming with tough sugar…and I asked her to marry me, I asked her right outside this bar. She said yes, we grew up happy and singing like the tiny weightless birds in the trees of the park. One day she was teaching a pottery class in a nearby store and a mom and her child walked in… she told me that the mom looked at the child as if a florist looked at the last flower on earth. We made love that night and conceived Lyra, 18 months later came Jasper and suddenly I was all grown up…”

The bartender and other customers were also now intently listening; the old man appeared to be speaking not to me but to himself, to something inside him. I urged him to continue once more but he erupted into a fit of helpless sobbing, no one around him paid notice… we all just waited to hear his story.

“We owned a rather large loft right near the park, I would wake up next to hear and hear those soft birds sing every morning… even in the winter, they even sang in the winter. Jasper and Lyra were growing up at this point, doing well in school and art and football. One night I went out to dinner with colleagues and had too much to drink, my lady laughed it off and nursed me to health… but that experience was so numb that I came to it the next day. Soon she became worried and spoke to my friends but at that point there was nothing that could stop me, I had fallen even more in love with alcohol. One night I came home stumbling drunk and she scolded me. In my drunken rage I hit hear on the side of her temple and she fell…”

The man looked down at his drank and the wet spots of salty tears around it, he looked straight at me and peered into my soul.

“She fell and hit her head on the side of a table, my son walked in the room at this moment and attacked me in anger and disappointment… knowing his life had been changed forever and he had no choice over that matter. So I grabbed him by the neck to tell him to stop and I yelled “STOP JASPER STOP STOP STOP” but it was not him that needed to stop for my intoxicated action squeezed the happiness and life out of his growing limbs. I phoned the police immediately and collapsed on the couch shortly after… I woke up in a hospital with a sheriff at my bedside. The sheriff told me that I would go to court and so I did and I spent the next 35 years in jail, my daughter never visited me.”

I sat in complete awe and stared at those around me, this man had committed such a violent act and I am sitting right next to him. The bartender quickly grabbed the drink and spoke to him sternly.

“When did you get out?”

The man replied so softly as to signify that no anger could grow inside him again, to show that we could trust him. “I got out today” once again silence carpeted the crowd and it was my turn to question him.

“So what are you doing in a bar?”

He gazed even deeper into who I was that day. He understood the quintessence of happiness in that moment.

“I am in a bar, outside of where I proposed to the woman of my obsession to look at the one thing that I have desired so much and that has caused me so much pain… so that I could look at this tiny glass and smell its delicious scent and be able to walk away and know that I am ready to realize what beauty truly is. As harmless as it may look if it hurts your heart, and steals your joy… then it is not worth your breathe”

I began to cry in that moment, for I no longer needed Anna.