12/14/12

Barmaid
By Rhiannon Morgan


You just told me that you thought books were the most romantic things.
Eurgh, that was hideously honest. Now I can’t even look you in the face and smile or blush or anything. Just in case I might mean it. I’m able to talk to you, to sit on your bed and argue over things like movies. In a different way to how I do it with everyone else in this town. Not so strange it’s alien but strange enough to keep me awake. The others were all oh, so different as well.
One gave me a nickname and broke my heart.
One wrote me a poem and I broke his.
One just kissed me as we talked about zombies and how much I can drink.
You didn’t laugh when I told the truth and pretended I was joking so it could stay a secret. Right now you’re looking at me in exactly the same way.
I’d like to think like a lonely girl does and say you’re looking into my heart. I think you probably want me to kiss you, saving you from making the move yourself.
The chair is rolling, following the gravity of the room that tilts with the house. I let it slide.
“Hm. Yeah. This room is ridiculous. One day it’s just going to collapse and leave a nonexistent dent in the Aberystwyth student population.”
“These houses are old.”
I glance at your face. I can see from that hunched seat on the bed that you’ve let the opportunity slide. I think I know you’ll never try the romance card again.
I’m sure I’m supposed to let all my inhibitions slide, and kiss you all over the bed, but I don’t really want to. There’s no reason why not, and part of me in a box is shouting that I should. Right now it could be fun, but I’m not myself.
I’ve just moved away from everything I know and nothing here is quite as broken or brilliant as that was yet.
Tonight is a work night, so after some vague, inconclusive nattering about films and your favourite TV programme I grab my shit, hug you and leave.
When I walk past the smokers on the doorstep I get a strange glance, which happens every single time I leave on my own. I think they wonder if I live there and why they haven’t noticed me before, or they know I don’t so they just wonder who I had sex with.
I walk down the street, and let the sound of your voice be replaced by a pop song.
The pub is fairly busy, well, it is for this pub. I count five at the bar and two in the bench next to the pool table. I’d be exaggerating if I said it was bigger than what it needed to be to accommodate those necessities.
Maybe I should include the toilets.
I like it. It seems to inhabit a strange middle ground between a safe haven and a dead end for the ambitious.
Leaning behind the counter, I daydream until someone needs a refill.
Tonight the drinkers on the bar stools feel like conversation. Normally it’s a quiet beer until the clock runs on, and nobody questions a person’s right to a non-committal five hours of silence, letting their coins in the jukebox make all the noise they need fill the room. I used to live in a place where conversation wasn’t what defined a chance meeting, but the eyes we’d make and the hands and lips we’d touch, and the music would just continue to play and deafen our gasps. You could wake up the next day with the sole comfort that most people there that night would’ve done worse.
Barely three hours drive away, and even dignity is a different word.
People treat the physical with less embarrassment but their own fragilities with more fear. It’s unnerving to me.
I get to be the usual third ear to a conversation about people I barely know by face, and not at all by name.
Then it’s my turn. I’m still new enough to be a curiosity, so it’s more interrogation than conversation. I get all the standard ones; where am I from, what am I studying, and what do I want to do when I finish?
“Are you in love?”
This one catches me off guard. I look straight at the face of the old, slack eyed, smudged drunk, and his eyes aren’t joking or numb, they’re oddly curious. He actually wants to know. To be in love is to be alive, and the eyes that are asking are full of dead regret. He’s asking it selfishly, the same as everything a drunken man or woman does. My answer may be special to me but it will only be according to how he relates it to himself that he’ll remember.
“I’ve been heartbroken, but I don’t think I’ve ever been in love.”
I don’t say anything else; I think I’ll save that huge slab of personal interrogation for another day and a different kind of midnight chat.


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"A tramp, a gentleman, a poet, a dreamer, a lonely fellow, always hopeful of romance and adventure."(Charlie Chaplin.)