The Goodbye Tale

Part 1

I sit at the bar, fascinated by the swirling of my glass. The cheap whiskey I had ordered from the bartender is a yellowish brown, not the ordinary caramel color that denotes a fine vintage. This is harsh, hard to swallow. My throat feels like a deluge of chlorine has been assaulting it for hours. Instead it is this well whiskey. The whiskey that, though it tastes about as good as a shot to the head, is doing it’s job well.

Around and around the yellow-brown liquid goes. With it, my thoughts. I wish that I could send my thoughts down into the swirl of liquid, empty out my head, but try as I might, and as drunk as I am, her memory remains. I’m trapped in my own head.

This bar, this dive, is where we met for the first time. Back then this place was brand new. The first bar in what would become many to reside on this street in this middle of nowhere town. A new place for the young to frolic and the old to morn. Back then I was young, I frolicked.

She walked in through those doors, back before the paint started to chip and the hinges creaked. She walked straight in through those doors and took my breath away. Her looks weren‘t stunning,  except for her eyes that were as wide as the moon. Her movement wasn‘t elegant, but something in the air around  her caught my attention. I followed her outside through the back doors to what used to be the lounge area in those days. It was a patio with a second bar and metal tables set up around an empty dance floor. Now it’s just a place the bums of the neighborhood come to sleep on rainy nights. The owner says he doesn’t mind because the bums because keep the raccoons away. He’d rather have a bum who can buy a drink every now and again than a raccoon that just eats the stale peanuts he serves at the bar and the garbage he lets pile up outside. He’s a hero of sorts to the bums around these parts for this kindness.

Back then the back patio was strewn with thousands of tiny white Christmas lights. It gave the place a warm intimate glow. A  far cry from the black and purple interior that was more conducive to one night stands with someone you’d regret having even talked to in the morning. Now all of the lights are either broken or blown out. I don’t go out on the patio anymore, but not for fear of the sleeping bums. Instead, I fear the images that would come to mind. Of course they come to mind anyway, but they might bowl me over if I were actually to venture out into the slumber party of smelly men and the occasional raccoon.

“Hi. I’m Alex”
“I’m Kendall.” she  smiled.

We talked for hours, Kendall and I. She was an artist, and was attending art school a couple of towns over. She had a love of music, was born and raised only miles away but her family was from New York. She had a brother she didn’t really know and had lost her father a few years ago to cancer. I joked that I had lost my dad too when I was younger, but it was to a mistress. She had been in the hospital only months earlier and since then had seemed to have the worst luck one could imagine. I told her about my family. About my sister never really being the loving sibling she should have been. About my parents divorce. About my grandfather, the only true father figure in my life, dying and how it still hurt every day. About going to college, but not really caring about any of it because all I wanted to do was create something that would make people happy. We exchanged numbers and promised to call each other soon.

“It was really great meeting you. Can we get together tomorrow?”
“Sure,” I replied.

“Can I fill you up?”
“Huh? Oh, no. I’m fine. Can I get the check,” I ask, back in the present day.

I can’t take anymore reminiscence tonight. I close out my tab and head home. Head still swirling like whisky in a glass, and my heart still beating despite the overwhelming feeling I always have that it has somehow gone absent in these last few months.  I walk out of the old creaky doors that once brought her into my life, and out into the cold dark night that envelopes me in its loneliness.