A man walks into a bar, as iffy as any man is. With an over-sized creamy shirt tucked into a pair of blue bell-bottoms, he carries his sadness on his sleeves, rolled up in a bunch as if he had just come off of work. He has no clue what the rest of the evening has in store but the bar seemed to be a heartening place for him to take his loneliness out on a date.

The poster above the bartender read, “There’s always room for one more” and that made him wonder ‘But what happens if your room was perpetually empty?’

The world around him is in a constant motion, the waiter drops the glasses, he hears a couple bickering in a corner about the color they would paint on their bedroom walls, there is a quaint man sitting in the middle of the tavern with nothing but a book in one hand and an unlit cigarette in the other, his head held down as if tiredness had intertwined with his soul. The room reeks of alcohol and tons of dreams crushed under one roof, seeking redemption in emptying glasses one by one.

He silently moves across and sits on a barstool and tries to think but then questions himself about what to think first. Probably about last night, when he held his father’s listless body and received the warmth that he ached for all those years, or maybe about the week before when he saw his wife with another man and felt a frosty knife making a pass through his heart.

Slowly and steadily he feels his weight on the bar stool getting heavier and heavier or maybe it was just his ribs trying to muffle the desperate screams of his heart, down his throat.

He hears his mind talking, constantly, the sound of his conscience keeps on playing over and over like an old broken tape recorder. This does not happen often, but enough for him to lift his arms and cover his head as if begging his mind to stop. A peculiar pain his flesh and bones experiences or rather suffers while the only prayer he makes is for his mind to stop talking and let him be. It starts for a second as if it forgets how to be human and just goes on for an hour and then slowly he grows accustomed to this uninterrupted feeling of being lost and it just seems to stay with him eventually. People come in his life and go as if they were just tokens meant to be showcased, not loved, but this constant nagging in his mind just keeps on going forever.

At that exact moment, the bartender comes up and asks if everything was okay and if he would want to order something. He smiles through his teeth carrying a heavy heart and a broken soul and says “Oh! No nothing, just the usual.”

Varun Ahuja

3-E, VSLLS