The Only Bliss On Which He Could Rely

He had been fighting for some time to avoid becoming an alcoholic but it was a losing battle in the hour between dinner and sunset. Condensation was forming on the side of the wine glass and he watched it with intensity.

The heat was dry but unrelenting. Sweat forged a gentle pathway from his hairline to his eyebrow to the tip of his nose. The solitary drop hung there momentarily, suspended without support just as he had been for months. The drop finally released and fell gently to the ground after a moment that lasted three. It splashed gently on the porous brick below and evaporated immediately.

He stood and picked up the glass by the stem. The condensation was perfectly distributed around the glass, like freshly fallen snow settling on even ground.

He smashed the glass against the edge of the table and watched shards of the glass scatter – some from the force of the impact and some in the cascade of wine he had caused. He could feel blood running down his hand but his only reaction was to laugh.

He stepped forward, laughing even as he felt glass crunching below his feet. There was pain now but that meant that recovery would come next and recovery – the departure of physical pain; the pain real enough to feel – was the only bliss on which he could rely.

There Was No Light As He Walked

The odor of beer and piss slowly gave way to that of day-old seafood scraps. There was no light as he walked and the adjustment from neon glow to darkness made him feel as though he was quite literally seeing red. A single light at the end of the block marked the driveway of his friend’s apartment block. He approached quickly as his fists clenched. There would be no need to knock on the door first.

He was prepared to let himself in.

Benevolent Forces Pulling Strings

Happiness was an elusive pursuit in which he invested negligible energy. At certain milestones of age as a number and ageing as a process he was prone, as so many are, to take stock of his achievements or lack thereof. At any given time he usually found himself to be ahead of where he had been when last he conducted this inventory of actualisation but he denied himself the feeling of responsibility for his progress. Though it was always true that time had passed and work had been done it likewise always seemed that any forward progress was the doing of benevolent forces pulling strings behind the scenes to push the narrative – his own story – ever forward. Their motivations for doing this were dubious and self-serving but they did drive the plot, as it were. He was continuously afraid that he was doomed to be forever a spectator if he did not pick up the pen and author the next chapter himself.

It Was Not Empathy

Sometime in the last year he had discovered an obvious truth that had escaped him in his youth: adults are little more than children that have grown up and mostly learned how to cover up the insecurities that continued to plague them. Some use bourbon, some write journals or passive-aggressive Facebook comments; only a few overcome the insecurities outright. By now he was adept at reverse-engineering adults by unpacking their guarded and jaded personalities into a workable mockup of the child, adolescent and lost twenty-something that had preceded the supposedly mature man or woman interacting with him now. It was not empathy but it did help him fake it.