Absence and the Heart

…Driving to the bar, I’m excited, all blown up, happy.
There a light in me, around me, this rare moment.
As inspired by the music I’m listening to as if I’ve created it myself.
Free from the idea that I’m not free.

....What I miss for some reason I can’t quite figure is my ring.

There in the bar, the Dixie Tavern, an old friend of a place with no real friends in it, this respite from respite, I start to tap the glass, and there is something unfulfilling in this, and so I wonder: what? It’s the clink.

It’s the ring against the glass.

I wore my ring for a long time after I was divorced, but not for any reason based on bullshit theories about how women chase after men with rings. It was there for something else, some other security.

But still, that was ages ago, and why now when I tap my finger against the glass and expect that familiar clink, I cannot guess.

…Anyway, the Dixie Tavern, not overly full but I don’t need it to be.
I just need to be out. I just need to hold a vodka tonic. Well, that and drink it.

And what has blogging and this convalescence done to me, all this down time, all this time I’m stuck alone with my mind and my computer? It makes me sit there at the bar scribbling notes on napkins and stuffing them in my pocket.
Things for fictions.
Things for the blog.
Etc.

Napkins which now I can’t uncrumple well enough to really decipher.

…Beside me early on is girl, her back turned, one of those shirts that don’t go very far down, one of those pairs of pants that hang low on the hip, a perfect and tight lower back, an overlooked part of the body, or it so it seems to me now.

Not that I'm lusting after it, or anything below or above it.
I'm a man in a museum. The exhibits wander by.

In fact, I don’t feel any real lust, not right away, not at all this night. I’m happy to be here, that’s all. In the chatter and the smoke and liquor smell.

…At the Dixie Tavern I’ve learned it best to pay from drink to drink or your tab will never equate to the drinks you can remember having taken. I find the right bartender, the one that makes them stronger, that is generous because he understands his generosity is rewarded in the tip, and so he pours the vodka deep and we have an understanding.

Nothing’s different here.
The band girls.
The boys wanting to play alpha male games.
The pool tables.

This is an old outfit. It occurs to me now, this night, when it’s almost fresh again, when this visit feels like one to nostalgia, that some night I’ll have outworn it.

The way I hear a cd and it occurs to me that I’ll never put it in again.
These strange and undramatic goodbyes.

But tonight, it’s not that night. That night, it’s still coming.

…I feel distant from the people, more distant than I usually feel, but not in a bad way, with no darkness between us, just space, or perhaps a sense of near invisibility, that I tonight I can really be a witness and nothing more.

Enjoy the noise.

I don’t have to know what the face of the girl with the lower back looks like.
There’s nothing I mean to connect with.

…What I do, tapping my ringless finger on the glass and making no noise, I think about my ex wife a little, and what she told me she did to get over me, which was think about me all the time, which was to never go numb against the pain or hide from it in noise.

To lock herself up and welcome it, embrace it, challenge it.
Until finally it was done with her.
Brave girl and smart.

And it doesn't bother me to think of this. In fact, it gives me a sense of ease. Perhaps I smile.

...And for some reason I think of my second ex, the second serious one, it’s been a year, maybe exactly, since she left, and what I think about while sitting at the bar is her flaws.

I see them in my head.
I remember how she grew past them and onto me.
I remember that she is not perfect.


…Two girls, they put their faces side by side and hold up their camera phones at arms length and take pictures of themselves together.

It’s nice to drink again and I think what I thought this summer, with the girl that lied about everything. Butt once upon a time, I didn’t know her as a liar, I knew her as a real possibility, or as close as I could get at that time to one.

And what I thought then, one evening at her house in the country, on the porch that overlooked the wilderness, where we sat drinking, where she sat with her tan legs raised and her head thrown back and the sky above us, I thought: if I was always slightly drunk, I could really be with her.

Maybe really be with anyone.

If every night I came home and had a vodka tonic.
Maybe two.
We could always be high and happy, always be goofing.

There are worse glues with which to hold a thing together.

…Sitting in the Dixie Tavern I look around and wonder if I could fall in love with somebody here.

Drinking in the Dixie Tavern, I think that indeed, I could, that in fact, it seems simple, looking at a girl for a moment, wondering about all the mysteries of her, believing that if you could be allowed to start to solve them, you would trade everything, your life alone, the parts of you that you want to hide, that to really know her, whoever she is, you would give up yourself to her.

In the Dixie Tavern, where they will try overcharge you on your nightly tab, where the good bartender pours extra vodka for the dollar beyond the normal dollar tip, where the girl with the tight lower back has roamed off with some pretty boy, her face still unknown to me, where I sit feeling comfortably invisible and in no kind of pain, I think about that idea of love.

The one we think we can almost feel for strangers.

The way it easy to love or hate from a distance.
How up close, it's more complicated.

...And the boys play there alpha games and I’m too far from it to even rate a challenge, and the girls, they wander around looking like something with which I could try to fall in love, but I’m too far from it really think that way.

It’s as if on this juvenile night when I've run away from home, I’m all grown up.
For a little while in the Dixie Tavern, drinking vodka tonics and half listening to the band, I recognize the me that I will be when I really have grown up.

What an odd time to encounter him.

…I scratch notes about how I’ll blog it all, felt tip notes on folded and wrinkled napkins, notes I’ll not be able to read, and they strike me later, now, the day after, at the end of this hung over dead, like any writing I’ve lost does, like if I could find them, they’d say finally the perfect things I need to say.

The way the girl who wanders off, even if you sent her wandering, she’s the perfect girl.

…I’m not cynical at the Dixie Tavern, not this night. Every one is ok with me.
Nobody is so bad as to be worthy of my wrath.
Nobody is so good as to be worthy of my desire.

I like this moment, this night, and I’ll pay for it the day following, but it’s worth the price.

Now, sitting here to write it down, wishing I could make out something from these napkins, I smile. I think it is kind of nice the words are gone. They’ll live up to my expectations better that way.

Like the person you lost young and therefore can idolize.
Like the dream you forgot and thus never subjected to that inevitable moment of iconoclasm.

They’re frozen, those words, on this paper, smeared, wet-edged, better off that way, a souvenir from the only night I’ve had at a bar in perhaps a month in a half, maybe longer, a rare night, a night with which I’m at perfect ease.

And now I'm removed from it by a day.
Now it's back to this apartment.
The television.
The internet.
The books I'm trying to write.
The papers I'm trying to grade.
Phone calls I'm trying to answer and trying to make.

But it's more ok now, those routines, the short break like a good vacation, and me every now and then knowing the absolute right thing and doing it.