Bar Song Six

Sitting in Jack's bar that night, next to Don. His head ducked down, eyes fixed on his drink.
A kid. He had hit a kid. A little boy, no older than his Joey.
Don was the one to call the hospital. He had his cell phone out already- sending his wife a dirty text message.
The ambulance arrived in an attack of light and sound. George stll, and will continue to for a long time to come, see those spinning red and blue lights when he closed his eyes.
The went to the ER, and was found to have two seperate breaks on his left leg, as well as a large collection of cuts and bruises on his side, back, and face, as well as a second degree concusion.
"An almost comical amount of damage for such a small collision" George thought to himself, with no humor.
This thought he followed with a dreaing of the beer in his right hand.
He set it down. It made a sad, empty 'clunk' as it made contact with the counter. He ordered another one.
This was one's sound was much better, and fuller.

George got home late, quite late, but not drunk. He was a man who could hold his liquor.
The house was dark and silent, so he picked his way carefully to the bathroom.
Where he realized he had forgotten to buy toliet paper after all. Shit.
He made do with kleenex.

He crawled gently into bed, so as not to wake Mary. He looked at her blonde, soft hair, and her slowly rising and falling back. Since when was she wearing her hair short like that?

George remembers what is was like to live alone. He remembers cooking for himself. He remembers losing his key. He remembers the size, or lack there of, of his perfectly square apartment. It was like living in a giant cube. He remembers hating the smell of the building.
He remembers falling asleep on the couch, because his bed was just too big and empty.
He remembers when Mary moved in, and how he loved falling asleep knowing she was there. He remembers enjoying how she would smile and sigh in her sleep exactly 2.3 seconds before she rolled over, and how it made him feel like a hero to keep her warm when she was shivering. He remembers the safety of knowing she'd still be there when he woke up.

He remembers all of that.
What he doesn't remember is when he stopped loving it, or why.

George watched her sleeping for a few minutes longer, and then, with a sigh barely preceptable to even the most careful of listeners, he turned his back to her, and went to sleep.

Bar Song 5

It's a fast world :
"Where you from?"
We speed along.
Make you run so fast you can't focus on-
And the worst is, no one changed my mind.
The best is I still get all your time
So if we're in love, I suppose,
I'm out of here before I get too close

I think we should, we should, we should be together. I try to love you like you've never pushed me around.
I think we should, we should, we should be together.
With you, I could slow dance anywhere I go.

I used to write childrens stories.
I once wrote one about land where you had to purchase your names, letter by letter. And a girl who couldn't afford a name.

On that note, bar song four is here!

Bar Song Five
Decked in his navy pinstripe suit, which he always fancied himself quite dashing in, George drove to pick up Don for car pool to work.
Don, similarly decked, provided as much stimulating converstation as Beth had.
This was fortunate. A good thing about Don has always been his ablility to hold an entire conversation by himself.
Had Don not been so absorbed in his own highly amusing and slightly obscene tale regarding his wife and a hair dryer, he may have actually asked George a question, to which George would have had to answer.
So, as it was, Don prattled on and George drove on, thinking about her, and how he should not be thinking about her.
So absorbed was he, by thoughts of not thinking, that he failed to stop at the stopsign at Maple and Third.
Needless to sat, and with fate being what it is, the one sign he ignores is the one he shouldn't have. Isn't that the way it always is?

The resulting crash would not have been so catastrophic had he hitten, oh say, another car, instead of, once again fate being what it is, of the child on a bike.

The ear tearing scrap of metal on much smaller metal wasn't so bad. George could've handled that.
It was the sickening, solid thump of a body hitting the ground that was the worst.
Don stopped talking. George sat behind the wheel, his eyes hut tight, and fingers gripping the wheel for dear life.

Seconds pass.

George unbuckled his seatbelt and opened the car door. The dinging telling him his door was obviously open (a feature George always noted to be fairly useless) matched his thoughts.

"Damn damn damn damn damn damn damn damn damn damn..."

He looked at the bike first. Blue and yellow and....
small.
Deep breath.
The body.

Bar Song Four

If I had one wish, my one wish would be,
I was out on a rock, in the middle of the sea.


Good day all.
Stress has me by the throat.
In a death grip.
Lovely, no?
Today I had two XL cups of Tim Horton's french vanilla cappuccino.
And no, I won nothing. Disappointing, no?

Bar song

When George awoke the following morning, his mind did not immediatly drift to her.
No, not immediatly. First he thought about how cold his toes were, how he needed to go to the bathroom.
In the bathroom he noted that he needed to pick up some toliet paper on his way home from work, and that his left ear itched.
Such mundane thoughts continued in such a mundane fashion throughout his morning routine.
Continued, until he was at the breakfast table, eating a bowl of cherrios with his daughter.
As they chatter of mundane things, or more, she chatted while George nodded. Mundanly.
George's eyes lazily drifted around the kitchen, and happened upon the flowers he brought home last night. His ears turned a most brilliant shade of crimson, rivaling the flowers themselves.
It was then his thoughts turned to her.

Turned so fast it was like whiplash of the mind.
Ouch.
And he stared so intensely into his morning cup of tea that an observant person would have seen that George's thoughts were not where they ought to have been.
Thankfully, his daughter Beth was not an observant person.
Beth prattles on about how Mr.Roberski was organizing a football team, and anyone who's anyone knows that the cheerleaders will be the best part of it, and how she wants to be a cheerleaders more than ANYTHING, but Mrs.Mulson is head of that, and she has it out for her, so she'll never get to join and her social life is going to be ruined.
And George drank his tea.

maybe I'd love it
if you spoke to me in french, italian, spanish

maybe i want you to romance me.
maybe i need you more than i'm willing to admit.

maybe this whole thing is a lie.
maybe i don't want you trying to open me up again

maybe i don't want you

maybe i want to mean everything to you

maybe i want to mean nothing to you

maybe i can't stand this indesicion

maybe i'm not loving this tension

maybe i want to be alone.
maybe being happy with you doesn't appeal to me one little bit

Bar Song Three

Using your blanket as a thermos,
what a way to keep your blood warm.
Fresh for the picking.
I am DARK today.
It's what I wear well this evening.
I don't claim to love the colour.
Using my glass of water
as a sort of rebirth,
drinking as if I intend to drown myself;
which is likely, the path I am heading down.
Is it possibly for a body to reject perfectly clean water?
It might be.
What you do if I told you today,
that I have the beginnning of what could
eventually being to be
a feeling of love for you? What would you do?
Would you come to me,
rip off my dark?
Would we sit in silence,
and gather it around us
and cook?
Joke's on you,
you have me.


Bar song

Thus was his astonishment to find himself facing not burly Jack behind a counter, but the women in pink, arranging flowers.
Upon the action of snapping his phone closed, she looked up from her yellow and red tulips and smiled.
"Hi there."
George stares, very much still lost.
Silence follows.
"Can I help you sir?"
In a desperate attempt to say something, anything, right now, George opened his mouth and loudly stated,
"You're not Jack."
The young brunette looked at him for a beat, then laughed, a good full laugh of one who enjoys the practise.
This jerked George awake. He gave a lopsided grin, and declared
"I would like to purchase some flowers"
Again the women laughed, which disconcerted George. He saw nothing funny in his statement. Frantically, he scanned the store and grabbed a bouquet at random.
Minutes later, he was on his way home, Jack's Bar forgotten, clutching his prize.
Upon arriving home, handing his wife the flowers, kissing her duitifully on the cheekm abd dropping himself into his chair in his den, he had his first coherent thought.
"She must be 25."

Bar Song Two

George's mind whirled, flashing back to the Wednesday before last, when a young women entered his office, carrying flowers, and wearing the most hideous pink polo shirt in all of humanity.
"Sandra's Flowers"
stated the back in fat, black script.
Sandra's Flowers, for George.
George's flowers.

His birthday flowers.
As the young last, attractive enough to be so in that horrid pink shirt, handed him those sweet white carnations, he couldn't help but notice that her hands were soft and graceful, as they moved to tie her hair back, or how that said hair was richly toned with reds and browns.
And how he felt terribly

obviously,

mortifyingly,

48.

As she walked away, he open the little card with his fat old fingers.
"Happy Birthday Daddy"
it read
"Love Mary, Beth, & Joe"
48.

Do you ever, just breifly,
fatasize about being someone else?
I do. I wish I was him, or her, or the girl on the bus.
I wish I knew them, wish I understood them.
Wish I could help them, be there for their choices and their hard times.
A girl from Dubia, in all black.
A little boy in spain, playing soccer with his friends.
An artist in France, who knows all the real places, the ones tourists would never go to.

And there are days when I wish to remain so anonymous that I won't even talk to my friends.
I'll just go out in the city and chat with strangers.
I'll wander and be lost in the crowds.
By a hotdog from a guy on Portage
and tip him generously.
Run at pidgeons on the street, because I don't like them.
Sit on the back of a bus for hours, not really going anywhere.

If the world ended today, right now, what would you regret?

(not holding you enough
not being there for you enough
not taking enough risks
not smiling enough)

Bar Song

There's a fire in your eyes,
and I hope you let it burn.

Why I haven't been blogging much:

Those of you who remember my new year promises,
recall the 'finish a novel one'?
I'm working on it.
i know that I'm 16, I'm young, I'm inexperienced,
but what better reasons to write one?
this is how I'll learn.

my main character, much to my dismay, is named George.
forgive me, i didn't want that name. he just told me so. i tried changing it, but changing the name changed him. i fought this battle for many days, with Ee by my side in spirit and cell phone, trying to coax a new name out of him.
End result was frustration on my part, and victory in his.

George, being my first important main character, my first character I am actually paying attention to, is consuming my time. You may find me slightly obsessed with him. I have a book dedicated to his story. A sketch pad to what he looks like, why he looks like that. another book for questions I have, and the few answers i get.
"would he be different if his job was any different?" yes of course he would be, but how..?
"does he like houseplants?"
"do his kids look like him? if not, does that bother him at all?"
"he bowls. why?"
"does he smoke? did he ever? why is he an alcoholic?"

etc.
You can be certain to hear from me and George on a fairly regular basis. For now, I'll give you a little piece of what I've written.


Bar Song.

-Having spent the time it took him to get from his office to here, with his head firmly down, and his brain occupied with his phone call, he neglected to look to see if the door he has opening and thusly walked into, was indeed the correct one.
Apparently, it was not.
"Don, I'm going to have to call you back"
"Sure George, don't forget Monday."
Without bothering to acknowledge the reminder, George snapped his phone shut and looked around.
The lights were not so harsh on his eyes, now that the shock from the grey day outside sudden;y being replaced was gone.
First was the realization of where he wasn't.
Then, the shock of where he had ended up.

This was not Jack's bar, his usual Tuesday haunt for after work pre-happy hour drinks.
This wasn't any bar.
There wasn't any alcohol here at all.

This was a flower shop.
Somehow, in his preoccupied state, his feet and lead him to her; to the last place he felt capable of being.