Alone at the Bar

I spend a lot of time alone at the bar.

Not the one with glasses of happy juice and tales of crazy nights, followed by mornings with fuzzy teeth and crumpled-up dollar bills in your pockets.

I mean the iron one, with bearings and whip and faded sheen.

The one you can hold in your hands and load with your burdens and hopefully still lift to your chest and then over your head, before you drop it and all falls away from you. Only for you to pick it up. Again ... and again. The path to strength lies this way, in these knurls and collars and cold steel and memory – muscle memory, heart memory, life memory.

Both are places of pain, I suppose.

With one you pay now, and with the other, you pay later.

Both are places we go to forget.

To forget our emptiness, our aloneness, our essentially solitary path through this life, no matter how many people surround us or how much we fill our days. We spend so much time with bars.

But one bar can save.

One has saved.

While the other continues with her empty promises, her Siren calls, her whispers that never quite become the something more she teases about. She is a beautiful temptress who will break you in ways the other bar never could.

Spending a lot of time alone at the bar can be really good for you, as long as you choose your bar wisely.