April 18th, 2014

Today, when I walked out of the coffee shop I looked up to see a man I had known two years ago when I was sad and drunk all the time. He was a barfly and the men I was comforting myself with were also, and so they knew each other and I by extension knew this man. I knew him in the peripheral way we recognize our own suffering in others. He was kind and cheerful and always always drunk. Very soon, the men I crowded my life with evaporated, moving away or entangling themselves with others, and I stopped fusing myself to the seats of that shadowy bar and started to notice things like the sun and myself again. I saw this man once more and he told me he was moving to the West Coast. So when I walked into the gray April afternoon from the coffee shop today and looked up to see him walking with a lovely blonde woman, I thought for a moment I had invented this. Wrapped tightly and bound to his chest was a small baby. The three squinted into the bright white of the day, moving almost as one unit, and he proudly the helm and the rudder, and I thought he might have seen me from the corner of his eye, and might have smiled in my direction, and whether or not this happened, I beamed as if the sun were out, as if the warmth of it was touching everyone. For a moment we shared the same pavement as he walked by, two ruined strangers restored and cutting paths though this sea, still.