You will have to forgive me when you realize I’m unable to draw my attention from you. I’ll admit it before anyone: I’m stuck in between this stool and the bar. My eyes are welling up with all the beer that I stole from the glass, so I might start weeping back into it. It’s not over the Lakers playing over my head or my chum at the bar who brought up another chum who can’t be here and never will again. I can’t cry over sports or over a man that did what he wanted to do, that managed to escape all the things I’m currently trying to steal my way out of.

I have guilt over my thievery, all the booze and all the glances I’ve managed to steal from you. See, I’ve been here for not a few rounds, I’ve seen you receive shoulders for the sake of the message, all vain attempts to break your face like a stain-glass window. I’ve watched every one of those senseless stones bounce off like popcorn seeds. I’ve heard you smile through your teeth the vile words of a crude assassin with the sureness of a paid and professional one. Yeah, before I lose my thirst, before these lights turn off and the music dies, you may have cause to kill someone. But I beg you not to keep that promise. I can think of so many better things to do tonight than hide a body.

So I sit in a bar, a thief among brutes, and look at you, an iron maiden with a child’s oversized eyes and two lips like giant breasts, which really compliment your giant breasts. And I realize life is a lot like a joke; they’re both inherently unfair. For one person to laugh, another must frown. Just because that Other may not be in the room doesn’t make it fair—it only makes it safe. And you can either laugh at this joke or foster a fury for it, one which will only grow and never ebb.

It was odd. While driving in a van owned by a passive-aggressively ruthless company that sold a passively-destructive product (ice-cream) to little kids on sport teams, old people and scholarly Asians I heard a song on student radio that I’d never heard before. But I heard it in my mind as if I’d lived a thousand mornings hearing that song or a song like it playing in a quiet 1 bedroom apartment, coming from your radio as I made coffee and rain beat at the windows. And as the day wore on without a change in brightness, so that morning never seemed to end. The coffee took three lifetimes to make and four more to drink, and I remember the eternity I waited for you to look up from the paper and into my eyes. For all I know or care to learn, the world ended at that moment, at the apex of my satisfaction.