Maria

“Whenever we have sex, I have these terrible thoughts about killing him. I don’t know what to do,” Maria said to me as her eyes teared up. She took another pull from her ceramic pipe and exhaled. “It’s just easier to not be together.”

I was surprised by her willingness to open up to me so easily. In a way I envied it, but in another way I hated her for being vulnerable. I knew we had been through the same thing. I knew she wanted me to share my story. I made up an excuse and left.

I found myself at the bar where I worked, surrounded by the comfort of small talk. Still, I was nagged by the thought that all the people who pretended to like me only did so in hopes of a free drink, or perhaps in hopes that I would make them feel superior to the other drunks by remembering their name or the fact that their daughter was getting married soon. All they really wanted was attention.

Most of the people who come here live alone because alcoholism has ruined their lives. Memories of divorces, lovers, and children who refuse to speak to them are left at the door; here they can be “themselves.”

The past is not brought up as they desperately try to convince themselves they are only going to have “a couple.”

I make excuses for them. I know they just don’t want to be alone another night, and it really doesn’t matter if that means taking home a stranger or drinking until they don’t remember, because they know that if they are left alone again, it might be the night they finally give in and chase a bottle of Xanax with a pint of vodka.

I look around at wrinkled lips wrapped around discount cigarettes and am filled with a deep appreciation. These people’s existence will keep me from driving my car into a lake tonight. Their desolate lives remind me that I still have a chance.

And nothing makes me happier than taking that self-satisfied sense of immortality and using it to order another drink.