Oh the things I do to ease my mind. To find a place to call home. I had a few hours to kill and I did just that: I slaughtered them in cold blood….. 

I headed out towards the beach alone after sunset and pulled into a dive bar to waste time and hear some old, nostalgic songs on the jukebox. I fully intended to leave after finishing my vodka, but it seemed the bartender took a liking to me right away. I dare say that I felt a predictable longing for her creeping up as well. She was quite radiant and I could feel my flesh getting weak and the lust that was jailed inside my chest was now chipping away at my rib cage. But I quickly resorted to drinking these instincts away because K had just randomly sent me a text saying she missed me and it regrettably did something to that sad lump of meat in my chest. My head and heart both started pounding in tandem even though I knew very well that she was laying next to another man even as she sent it. The present tense had started to become unreasonable to me and I wanted to drag everything current out behind the bar and beat it senseless.
It had been so long since I had felt whatever it was that K was doing to me. However pathetic it seemed, in the strangest way it kept drawing me even closer to her. K was young, full of vigor and delightfully insane and every time she messed everything up it dizzied my head. I am horribly attracted to all the things that she does wrong. It’s as if I am trying to hide myself inside of her mistakes and every single thing she fucks up makes her dearer to my heart. That beautiful little idiot…. I needed more drinks. I didn’t want to be gone from K’s life. I just wanted to know that I could be gone if I needed to be. I wanted to know that I was still in control and I could escape all the fantasies of K that still haunted me if only I wasn’t so hopelessly adorned by them.  Until this point, I had been making myself entirely too available to her and that is one of the most tragic and unattractive things you could do to a girl. I might even say that that is what drove her away in the first place. You always throw a fish back unless you intend on consuming it entirely. And she knew my old, hollow bones offered no satiety.  

But, women love a challenge. And a flawless girl like the bartender (who I will call “L”) has the entire world at her disposal. I had already watched at least 4 men (clearly with much more to offer her than I) convey thier undying love to her. I suspect that she must have read the tragic comedy on my face, for the travesty I had with K was all over me like cobwebs. She must have seen it and accepted the challenge because she soon swayed over and placed a shot of goldschlager in from of me.

“What’s that for?”

“Don’t worry,  you deserve it.”

“I have to drive all the way back home”

“You already promised Steve and Pam you wouldn’t drive. Come stay with me”

“Who’s the guy at the end of the bar?”

“Oh, he’s a regular”

“I saw you kiss him earlier”

“Haha. I broke up with him”

“You’re bad.”

“I believe you might even be worse. You’ve had your head in your phone all night. So What’s her name?”

“Haha.”

“Or are you just trying not to look at me?”

Winks soon become tongues.  And every glance she gave me was a bridge to somewhere else on her body. Her limbs were rivers and channels leading out into vast, bottomless oceans and it seemed that I had set myself up to lovingly drown. To float so silent and peacefully downwards. I looked around for something to hold onto to keep my head above the waves. A distraction. A call from K? No, the entire atmosphere was like an undertoe pulling me back towards L. Her eyes were such heavy rocks pulling me to such peaceful depths. Dragging. Drowning. Touching. Hopeless.

“I’m not staying with you.”

I stumbled outside into a light, cold rain.  The ocean that I had been stuck in, with all its desperate wavelengths, quickly stilled and turned to glass and everything is so close to breaking and dying. It’s as if nothing should be touched and I should leave the world just how it is and sit right here in this spot forever. My body is an old, rusted anchor buried in the sand outside L’s apartment. I took a deep breath and pushed the wind back away from my skin and threw all the rain back into the clouds and pulled the spiraling earth to a slow crawl.

This is what humans do, right? We become animals and indulge on our most maddening desires, then we blame it on whatever demons seem convenient. No, not for me. These oceans of glass carried me here and I should stay and let the world pass me by. I’ll sit and collect bad words and sad stories and secretly wish they were mine and I’ll look at pictures other people took and wonder about things other people have found. And there will be great hearts and minds passing by I’m sure, and pretty ladies and true gentlemen and I’ll let them all drift away and return to where they came from. Because the glass earth can only bare my weight if I keep ever so still….

Just an old rusted anchor that may have finally found its home.