happy hours.

There are few things more awkwardly self-revealing than being in the middle of a slow moving pub by yourself waiting for someone or something to show up.

It’s small, the kind of place where there’s a pretty good chance that everyone really does know your name, and tabs run high and so do emotions and when you show up as an outsider to a place like that you can feel it, a distinct change in the atmosphere as though you’ve just entered a foreign country where you hardly know the language at all.

There’s a lot to talk about what with The Chill, and everyone agrees or disagrees about politics, sports, relationships and movies but it doesn’t matter to them because they all know each other and what they’re there for and playoff or primary every day is a big day for New Yorkers.

And you can tell easily enough those who have been here for hours, whose day didn’t include (from 8 to 6) being trapped behind office doors and bright and blinding computer screens with responsibilities so far outside of themselves that they’ve lost sight almost entirely of who they really are. No, they are trapped in different ways, perhaps. Their lives...well, you never know, do you?

It’s only in a place like this that you can sit by yourself and drink your $3 pint special (from 6 to 8) and think long and hard about what you’re doing and what you want and where you’re really meant to be in the whole vast configuration of things. It may even be in those twenty minutes you have to yourself (the only twenty minutes of your whole day it would seem) before someone or something shows up that you can even seriously allow yourself to begin to contemplate the answers. And if you’re like the guy next to me who had two too many two or so hours ago you’re sitting there with your mouth open and eyes closed probably dreaming of a time in the not-so-distant-past when things made a lot more sense.

Because when you suddenly find yourself in a foreign country right smack in the middle of your hometown you may find yourself questioning what exactly you’re waiting for and why, and the answers to those kinds of questions never do seem to be there looking back up at you from the bottom of your glass when you’re ready to go home.

love reservations.

Couples in all five boroughs will be sitting across from each other tonight, a candle between them illuminating their prix fixe menus and their relationships.

As the prosecco is poured and orders are placed for what is going to be just another dinner in a long line of dinners together, they can’t help but think about how it’s always so easy to love someone when they’re right in front of you.

And later, amidst the overwhelming smell expensive perfume and garlic you’ll be able to tell when another person has fallen out of love.

They’ll excuse themselves from the table leaving their steamed artichoke exposed near the heart, the discarded leaves with teeth indentations still sitting just off to the side, neatly stacked.

I accept Time absolutely.

What a silly thing time is and what it is to look back on your life and see how much has disappeared. If you’re like me you compare everything to what happened to you on this very day four years ago and think even now, so many days and hours and minutes removed from that one moment in your whole vast life that somehow it still feels like it happened just yesterday.

I guess that’s what happens when you lose someone you love and you lose them quickly, unexpectedly without warning at a time when you figure you’ve got so much more time with them ahead of you. You go to sleep one night and wake up the next morning to a ringing phone that’s going to usher in news you don’t want to hear but can’t avoid no matter how much you try. And you don’t have time to say goodbye, such a small word really, but as soon as the chance to say it gets taken away from you it suddenly means so much. Everything before everything changed feels like another life, like it happened to someone else who was living in some alternate universe because now you think, looking back on it, that there was no way something like that could have happened to you, no way it could have happened and you actually survived it.

But time keeps moving forward and so do you and you realize after not having been able to feel it for a while that your heart’s still beating. People lose people all the time and you’re not alone so you figure that you should learn from it, learn from how fast these things can happen, how fast life happens and how easy it is to take things for granted. And we do it all the time, something as simple as thinking we know what tomorrow is going to bring (hell, we even believe our weathermen). We expect everything to go as planned - we expect the subway to come, for our local coffee shop to be open, for our jobs to be waiting for us, and above all we expect the people in our lives will be waiting for us, too.

If you’re like me you know better and you think people who don’t are a lot worse off than you because they don’t understand (but at some point eventually, they will) that this is it. Because this isn’t misplacing. No, we can misplace all we want because with misplacing there’s a very distinct chance that whatever we’ve lost we will inevitably get back. And that’s all we need isn’t it, that logical answer of: well it couldn’t have just disappeared into thin air. Your keys, a book, your iPod, subway pass, that letter or picture. I just had it, you think to yourself. I just had it.

Your logical will struggle with your non-logical as you try to come to terms with the fact that there is in fact no re-tracing your steps, no hope of ever getting back what you’ve lost. Finality like that is overwhelming and it changes you, it has to, because when you lose certain things for good like a person or a love or a chance of a lifetime you’ve got no choice but to see the world differently along with your place in it.

So you learn. Yes you learn to take more risks and more chances and to be brave and to not be so afraid, but the most valuable thing you learn are the tricks that Time can play. Bewitching, deceiving, there’s-never-quite-enough-of-it Time. You know now for certain something so obvious and yet were only really able to fully understand four years ago, that you can just have a lot of things before they slip right through your fingers. The question now I suppose is how often do you let them, or have you also learned the very important lesson of knowing when to tighten your grip on what matters while you still can.