I was off from work today. I was off from work, and after some initial Christmas shopping and visiting with the mother, I tried to tend to every creative nook I have: reading, music composition (which is a joke, but that's a whole other story/blog/embarrassment), and writing. For said writing, I decided to head down to the neighborhood bar for a drink. I wore my beanie, tucked my headphones in under the black fabric and my naturally curling hair, and moved on with the novel where I'd last left off Tuesday while sipping on a locally brewed beer.

     And it seemed each time I looked up I was being watched. The bartender. The group of women across the bar (U-shaped), obviously drinking together after a day at work, the young couple to my left, the loud men to my right, and all the while I was fixated on the couple in their late thirties directly across from me. As they sat there face to face, looking past one another, one at one TV and the other at another, or people watching, or just staring out the windows, or into the open-faced kitchen, but not at each other, and not talking, and I found myself whispering to myself, mouthing the words, "Say something." I said it three or four times. "Say something." Saw the rings on their fingers. The empty glasses lingering about their elbows. "Say something."

     The carpenter seated next to me who tried to strike up a conversation soon as the headphones came out of my ears to let the bartender know I was done.

     "Writing down the tunes?" he asked me.

     "No." Chuckled. "No."

     "Saw you jamming out. Thought you were writing down the tunes."

     "No." I smiled. "I'm, um... working on a novel, actually."

     Unnecessary information, I don't know why... embarrassed... shouldn't have said anything... now I'm gloating...

     "There's a lot to write about," he said.

     "That depends," I responded.

     He looked at me, like he was awaiting further explanation. But I hardly knew what I meant myself. I glanced to the bartender for help. He's pouring beer from a tap. A beautiful girl just around the corner of the bar is watching our conversation but she tries to appear disinterested. She's sitting alone, drinking a glass of wine, and I wonder if she's waiting for someone or if this is the height of her evening. Too beautiful to be alone. Definitely waiting for someone, I decide.

     "It depends on how you see the world," I say to him then.

     "Yeah," he says.

     "Depends on if you see the realism in it," I said.

     I'm talking bullshit. I'm talking bullshit because I'm infected with the mindset of my characters, and I'm wanting to pay my bartab and go home, and because I don't know how to talk to strangers, and because the beautiful girl is still watching us.

     "There's a lot in the world to see," I tell him. "Just a matter of whether or not you take the time to recognize it."

     "You've got a point there," he says. "Took me forty years to step back."

     I nod. Because I don't know what else to do.

     "I thought you were writing the tunes," he says again.

     I chuckle like a friend. "No. Can't write songs."

     "If you can write a novel, I bet you can write music."

     "No," I say, and this time I speak with confident truth. "Two completely different languages."

     We chit-chat, he goes to the rest room, I pay my tab, he comes back, his back turned to me, staring out the window at the overcast sky, at the gas station across the street, at the traffic going home at ten minutes past five, at the headlights flowing in streams like blood at the dictatorship of the heart, and I pat him on the back as I walk past, and I say to him, "Good luck," and he says to me the same,

"Where were you until two-thirty in the morning?"

"Two—"

"Two-thirty. That's when you called me. Two-thirty. Where were you?"

"On the water."

"James."

Accusatory.

"I came straight home. Looked around the house. Called you."

"You can't trap past sunfall. I know that, you know that. What were you doing?"

"I must have fallen asleep."

She stopped chewing her lips, impregnated them with exhaustion instead, and a full breath of air came out of her. He closed his eyes, saw only the moon, and it was not white. It was not even grey.

"I went for a swim."

She turned back toward him then, and her mouth had tumbled open, and her hand stiffened on his back, and she'd come up off the bed, as if she were hovering there, invisible threads tethering her, and he flexed his fingers on her back as if to feel them.

He felt nothing.

But loss.

But confusion.

But the abstinence of understanding.

"You did what?"

He felt embarrassed, ashamed, and he let out a sigh, collapsed away from her, and his hand floundered up over her side as if limp, fell onto the bed between them.

"It'd been years. Hell, since I was a boy." The story came tumbling out like blocks from his mouth, spelling words, and words turned into sentences, and sentences into paragraphs, and he could not stop them. He vomited them. He vomited them so violently he had to gasp for air between them, and the wrinkles in Jess's forehead deepened with each delivery, between each audible inhale.

"There I was," he said. "All the time right there, and I'd lost my reverence for it. Held it as uninspired as solid ground."

"If you had any reverence for it," she said, "swimming is the last thing you would've done. James, the ocean in winter? It's snowing outside, for Christ's sake," and he felt the tickle of her exasperation on his cheek. "You could have gotten hypothermia."

"But I didn't."

"What's come over you lately?"

He said nothing.

"Going for a swim in the dead of winter? Behaving as if you don't recognize our very own son? Gurgling in your sleep?"

"Gurgling?"

"Down in your throat. Not drooling, I checked your pillow. Hardly even salivating. Just gurgling. As if it were coming from out of your chest. Your heart choking on your own blood."

"Like drowning," he said.

She put a hand to his chest. "Down here." Tightened her fingers, and they held point around his heart, caged it in. "On yourself."

"There's nothing there," and he put a hand over hers, and they strangled off his heart together.

But she laughed. She laughed and he felt hot, a fever rising up his neck, in his face, his temple, and he thought he might glow red like coals left to simmer alone. And he was about to roll away from her, spin into blackness, until she said, "James, you have the biggest heart of anyone I know. You just don't always know how to show it. But the past few days caused me to realize the solution to that isn’t running from it but healing it.

"There's emotional intimacy within you, but it's not instinctual. You have to be taught it. And that's not your fault. But it's not mine, either. But it is, now, my missive.”

He remained on his back but she curled toward him, towed him in close, holding him in, and he turned to water against her, dampening the bed, her nightshirt, and she shivered from the cold of it. Shivered, he thought, from the nearness of him.