He started off, (as I was waiting to catch the bartender’s attention to order a vodka soda and proceed to drown my week in grain alcohol with a side of lime) with, “why do you look so tough?”
That’s what it sounded like anyway, because he was one too many pints in the bag to be taking the time to properly annunciate things, but when I looked at him quizzically (read: squinted my eyes) he repeated himself and this time it was clear – I look tough, and he wanted to know why.
I didn’t have an answer for him, and truth is I didn’t have an answer for myself. After slurring more to me about why I shouldn’t look so tough (“do you always?”), I started to think about why we all have our own walls that we put up around ourselves, walls that we’ve had for so long that we don’t even see them anymore, leaving it so someone else, a stranger with drunken blurry vision to see it clearer than you do.
It’s like when you lapse into a panic attack (see “matter of the heart”) and you suddenly begin to feel everything you couldn’t before. And you weigh your options. You can go to the emergency room, but given Murphy’s Law you’ll get over it while you’re waiting in the ER. You can try to never let yourself be alone, because you think that if you’re going to collapse again, at least you’ll have someone there to catch you.
Or, the next time your heart wants to explode you can just tell yourself that you’re fine, that you’ll be okay, because while your relationship of heart and sleeve may be in need of immediate separation, you know you’re tough. And it’s okay if you look it.
Remedy: steer clear of mumbling drunk men (who may or may not be able to see more than they should), drink more vodka sodas (at $8 a glass, but don’t stress!) and hope for the best.
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