They’re laughing. I am sat between them, my friends, in a dimly lit booth near the back of the bar. The topic of conversation is how we all met back in high school. A pattern emerges; they all disliked me until they ‘got to know me.’ Now, they love me. It was difficult, then, to see in me what they see now, whatever that may be. I would not know. I don’t know. They continue to talk, now about how much they’ve all changed since those days, how goals shifted and old grudges have been forgotten. And I see that change in them. They all smile when one turns to me and remarks on how little I’ve changed in all that time, though, how I’ve always been the same dry, old soul. I smile too, a decision made. I lift my glass to my lips, thinking that if I hadn’t known these people for so long, I wouldn’t call any of them my friends.
The glass is empty, save for a wilted orange peel and a half-melted ice cube. It’s my first drink of the night, while the rest are well into a buzz. This is a celebration, I think? Someone must’ve graduated. Maybe I’ve met them in passing before, but I don’t really know. Everyone else is here to celebrate. I’m here because I told myself that it would be good for me; see friends, get a break from the studying, try getting drunk for once. I motion to get out of the booth to get another drink. They let me out. I stretch my legs a bit, not realizing just how long I’ve been sitting. All the light is artificial and unnatural, straining my eyes. Something about how the colors don’t behave like they’re supposed to — it makes me too aware of myself. I curl my toes in my boots and take slow breaths as I walk to the bartender. A sticky floor tugs on my soles and I look around at the decor. The newspaper clippings and old photos are met with just as many ads for different brands of alcohol. Maybe at one point this place was a respected establishment, but now it’s just the cheapest place in the city for 20-somethings to get wasted every weekend. This weekend I am one of them.
I take an empty seat at the bar and order another Old Fashioned. They taste terrible, but it’s something to sip on so I won’t be goaded into trying whatever neon cocktail they’re drinking back at the booth. They would press on about how they just found a drink I’d like, one where “you don’t even taste the alcohol,” only to be disappointed when I grimace and bitterly swallow. Trying to hide alcohol always made it taste worse.
My phone buzzes in my pocket right as the drink is served. I don’t bother looking at it. It’s my mother. She’s the only one who texts me first and I always ignore her. I do just that, leave my phone in my pocket and sip my drink, still at the bar, not ready to go back to those friends. I sit there and begin to drift out of myself. My tongue runs across my teeth and I drag my fingers across the grain of the wood. I blink a few times, staring into the glass, unsure of what color my drink is, what color I might be under these lights. The song playing is one I’ve heard but don’t know the name of, something that scratches my ears, takes up space between them. From an angle unseen, I look at myself. I am here at a bar with friends I’ve known for years and I still feel the same. The thought grounds me back into myself. I knock back the rest of the drink.
Readying myself to head back to the booth, I feel a hand on my shoulder stop me from behind. A new voice says, “At least stay to try the drink I ordered you.”
There’s a stranger over my shoulder. I cannot tell what color his eyes are, but his smile is wide as I look at him. He sits down next to me, hand still on my shoulder, his jacket bending lights in a strange way.
“You okay there?” he asks.
I blink, “Yeah, I’m… I’m fine. Sorry, what did you say?”
“I said, you’ve got to hang around a bit longer to try the drink I got you.” He chuckles. “When I saw you, you had this frown — like a kid trying to take their medicine.”
“You ordered me a drink?”
His hand leaves my shoulder. “I hope that’s okay.”
I blink. Then, I nod. A moment passes where we’re both quiet, looking everywhere but at each other. I see his nails are painted, or at least look that way in the light. He has as many rings on his fingers. The drink he ordered me arrives in a fancy glass, the contents still swirling around.
“What was that? What you were drinking before?” he asks.
I turn. He’s looking at me intently, and I tell him, “An Old Fashioned.”
His face holds, only a moment, before breaking into soft laughter, almost turning away. He’s shaking his head.
I pull this new drink closer to me, eyeing him.
He calms himself, all smiles, “Sorry, it’s just… an Old Fashioned? Doesn’t seem like you.”
I ask, “What would be fitting, then?”
“Why don’t we find out together?”
I stare at him and think his eyes might actually be blue.
“You gonna try it?” He points to the drink in front of me. I look at it, wondering what color it really is, outside of these lights. He just smiles and shrugs, watching me. I bring the glass to my lips and take a swig. It burns all the way down and leaves my mouth tasting bitter. A frown pulls my face as I feel the drink fall through my insides and I try to scrape the taste off my tongue with my teeth. He laughs again, I can hear him above the chatter, above that booth of friends. He puts a hand on my back.
“God, what is that?” I hack out.
His laughing dies down as he tells me, “A Corpse Reviver. Number one. You know, you make real funny faces.”
I ignore him. “And that was supposed to be better than my last drink?”
“No…” he waits, looking up at nothing, “just, more ‘fitting,’ as you’d say.”
I don’t understand him, and after a moment of looking at his smile, I shake my head. There is a noticeable warmth in my throat and I breathe out through my mouth. The song changes. It’s even louder than the last.
He pulls me back by saying, “So how about that? You feel ‘revived,’ don’t you?”
I blink, groaning out, “I guess…”
“Sorry you didn’t care for the taste.” He scratches the back of his head, fingers lost in a wavy mess of hair. “I thought it’d change your night.”
“Why the interest in my night?” I reply, too quick.
“I thought I saw something in you.”
My phone buzzes in my pocket again. I ignore it. “What might that be?”
“Well, I’d like to get a better look. If that’s alright with you.” He sets his elbows on the bar and crooks his chin on his palms, just looking at me awhile with now brown eyes. He continues, “You’re not alone tonight, are you?”
I am not alone. “I’m here with some friends to catch up. I went to the bartender for another drink, and here we are.”
“Good friends?” he asks, still smiling at me.
“Is there any other kind?”
“How about you tell me,” he replies, smooth, quick.
“I’ve known them for some years now.”
“And that means they’re good friends?”
“We make each other laugh, smile. We reminisce…” I shrug. “That’s friendship.”
“Is it now?” he asks. His smile holds as he leans back. “You don’t seem too enthusiastic about it.”
I drop the smile I didn’t realize I even had. “I’m just not the enthusiastic type, sorry.”
He hums, clearly in sudden deep thought. I just look at my half-finished cocktail, the taste lingering on my tongue and the alcohol still trying to settle in my stomach. A warmth travels up from my belly to the back of my ears. My hands feel sweaty and my head heavy. He tells me, “I don’t think I believe you.”
I almost scoff, but instead I just ask, “What?”
“Come on,” he laughs. “I want you to be honest with me.”
“I am being honest,” I protest.
“Everyone gets enthusiastic over something.” His smile feels sharper, teeth shining in the glows around us. “You’re telling me that’s just not in you?”
The song must’ve changed again. I don’t recognize what I’m hearing. It feels unfitting for a place like this, for the chatter of a bar. It doesn’t drown anything out, it might not even be a song at all. It amplifies the sounds that used to hide. I can hear them in the booth laughing without me.
“I think,” he starts, then pauses, as if trying to find the right words. “I think you just need the right thing to be enthusiastic about.”
I lean away from him, just a bit, taking in a sharp breath. He seems as if he’s been in this moment of time before. I swallow and try to say, “I just… don’t think that’s who I am. It doesn’t describe me.”
“Hmm…” he hums. He nods toward the booth. “But it describes your ‘friends’ over there, right?”
I don’t even look. I just nod. “More than it does me.” I sigh. He’s still looking right at me. “It’s not like I haven’t tried.”
“Oh, have you?”
“New hobbies, new people, new settings.” I don’t know why I’m telling him this. “Nothing had much of an effect.”
He goes quiet. I hate the sudden silence between us.
“Look, we can describe other people as a grouch, as a killjoy, right? These kinds of people exist, we know that, we know them to exist. Sometimes a person is just…”
I stop when I see his smile is gone. I don’t know when it left. His brow is bent in what looks like concern. “Maybe, but…” he starts, “Just because those types exist doesn’t mean you’re one of them.”
“I don’t know another way to be.”
He repeats, “I don’t think I believe you.” This time when he smiles, it doesn’t reach those green eyes of his.
He turns away from me, taking out his phone, suddenly invested in the device. My back tightens and I think I hear the music again, another song I don’t recognize. The lights are low and intense, bouncing from the glasses behind the bar to the bodies sat before it. I can feel my own eyes on myself, aware and distant. I’m looking at myself in the third person, with a stranger’s eyes. I can see myself at the bar, my friends in the booth. The song playing surrounds me, the phone in my pocket buzzes again. None of it feels real. I drift farther away from myself, then a hand is on my shoulder again.
“You want to get out of here,” he says. Or asks. I’m unsure. I fall into myself at once, a new gravity pulling me taut. His hand gently slides down my arm and meets my hand. His fingers part my own, gripping my palm and pulling me away from the bar. I look at the booth once more, seeing my friends still laughing among the rainbow shadows cast on the walls. My breathing feels lighter and I become aware of the muscles in my face as he leads me outside.
Snow lines the streets, breaking apart the orange light of the streetlamps above us and blanketing the city in that winter haze. Night never falls when snow does, the darkness in the distance a mere suggestion. The shock of the cold and thin air makes me cough. He slaps my back a few times before my fit ends.
I ask, “Why’d you bring me out here?”
He looks at me and smiles for a moment before looking back out to the street. He talks past me, “Our ride’s almost here.”
“You’re taking me to your place?”
He turns to me again, his face a stone, “Do you not want that?”
My weight shifts, crushing snow beneath my boots. I glance over my shoulder to the entrance of the bar and hear a vehicle pull up to the curb. The air cuts into my nostrils. “That’s not what I said.”
His smile returns and he opens the door to the car. “Then let’s go.”
No light comes from the back of the car, just a deep blackness. He’s waiting for me to enter first, the cold making him blush. Just above his cheeks I see his eyes, the light tricking me into thinking they must be red. I am cold and the car seems warm, so I climb in. He does the same. The driver, a lady with blonde hair, pulls away without a word as I sink into the heated seats. Only then, I realize how uncomfortable I was at the bar. The only light comes from the passing glows of whatever we happen to drive past.
He scoots closer to me, almost leaning on me, asking, “Your friends usually meet together at bars?”
I look out the window, trying and failing to recognize streets. “They wanted to celebrate some graduation or something. I was only invited.”
“Hm, ‘graduation…’ I still got a year or two before my own. Med school takes a while.” He leans away, a proud grin streaking across his face. “I’m gonna be a surgeon someday, you know.”
It is the first thing I get to know about him. “Sounds intense.”
“It can be,” he says. “You almost have to have x-ray vision. Know what’s already inside before you get to actually look inside.”
“What do you find?”
He lets out a small laugh, “Insides.”
The orange lights bleed into the car every now and then. He doesn’t continue, so I say, “It must be strange, seeing inside someone like that.”
“What’s strange is how easy it is,” he says, voice low. “Once you’re past the skin, everything else just gives way. Free to manipulate.”
My hand moves to my stomach, as if to protect it. A heavy breath flees from my nose as I think about being rearranged. Ice is crushed by heavy wheels, and in the absence of the radio it is the only noise I hear. More lights pass.
I hear him mumble, “Didn’t mean to gross you out or anything…”
“No,” I say, quickly. “You didn’t — it’s just a strange thing to think about.”
I can feel his weight shift in the seat. He asks, “Well, what about you? Are you studying anything?”
I blink before saying, “Botany.”
He waits for a bit, expecting me to continue. I don’t, so he asks, “Botany… Plants, then?”
“Yeah. Mostly trees.”
“Oh!” He’s smiling wide again. “Then, can you answer this question I’ve always had?”
I shrug and turn back to the window. I do not recognize the road we’re on. “Sure.”
“Well, you see those trees out there?” he asks, placing one hand on my shoulder and using the other to point out. I see them, just barely. The darker shadow in the haze along the street, bare to the freezing cold. Thick trunks that split themselves into myriad branches, and without the leaves of spring and summer it’s like looking at a skeletal system. The bones of a wrong arm jutting out from the frozen soil, the hand’s fingers twisted, broken, and splayed out. Just a silhouette splintered against snow. He continues, “How do they even survive in winter when they look so dead?”
I turn back from the window. “It depends on who you ask. Some say they’re just dormant.”
“I’m asking you. What do you say?” He’s not looking at the trees. Just me.
A bitter taste still sits on my tongue. “They’re no more dead than they usually are.”
He smiles a bit, “And how dead is that, exactly?”
I don’t smile with him. “Almost entirely. Not much of a tree is alive.”
The car turns left, onto a narrow road without the orange lights above us. I cannot see anything out the window anymore, the headlights not cutting through much. He removes himself from my side and asks, “What part of it lives?”
“The bark.”
He says nothing and neither do I. The car slows and stops, the driver looks up into the rear-view mirror, at the man next to me, who only nods. I only see the whites of his eyes. He gets out of the car and cold air wafts in. Soon after, he walks around to open the door for me, all with that smile. My phone buzzes again but when I reach for my pocket his hand finds mine, and he pulls me away. The door closes and the car drives off, headlights getting dimmer and dimmer until there’s no light at all. He holds my hand tight as he leads me through the snow to a house I can only trust is there. The noise of night is gone, just the thin air slicing its way to my lungs and the subtle static of the blankets of snow. My feet are trudging through it all.
His free hand pulls out his keys, the distinctive jingle of cheap metals ringing in the silence. I’m pulled inside once he opens the door. Warmth washes over me and a pain reaches my ears. I let go of his hand to reach for a light switch, but he grabs me again, pulling me. “Come on,” he whispers, as if someone could hear us. “Follow me.”
I think I see something move in the dark, across the room, near the far wall that I hope is there. The only light is from a dim digital clock that reads 23:34. I follow him and stupidly ask, “What’s going to happen?”
“Something you’ll enjoy,” he says. “If I was right about what I saw in you.”
“What if you were wrong?”
“Then I was wrong.”
He pulls me into a room, closing a door behind us. Soon after, his hands find my back, touching softly, exploring. I ask, “What was it?”
He’s leading me deeper into the room, his hands eager and grabbing my clothes. “Hmm?”
“That thing you see in me. What was it?”
Hands take off my jacket, then they start pawing at my shirt as he groans out, “I couldn’t tell you…”
I turn to face him. Our faces are inches apart and yet I cannot see him, “Why not?”
He doesn’t respond, not immediately. His hands leave me and I hear soft footsteps move past, then the undeniable creak of bed-springs. I do not know from which direction, but his voice is everywhere saying, “If you wanna keep talking, just climb up here with me.”
I hear rustling, the sounds of zippers. I follow his lead, taking everything off and setting my phone atop the pile I make before I join him on the bed.
A soft chuckle escapes from him. “You’re real good at following instructions.”
I release a breath I didn’t realize I was holding, “Can you just tell me?”
“I’ll tell you anything you wanna hear.” Hands are touching me again, grabbing me like they’re trying to break past the skin.
I let him articulate me as I speak again, “Just tell me. What do you see?”
Those hands find my face and he kisses me. My eyes are open, though the darkness of the room is so thick it makes no difference. My hands are by my side when he breaks away, while his hands are on my mandible. My mouth is opened and my jaw hangs when he sticks his two thumbs in there, sternly telling me, “Don’t close your eyes.”
My eyes widen and tremble. A muffled buzz comes from my phone. I can feel his eyes. They are peering into me, down my gullet, looking for something. I wonder if this thing he sees in me is still in there. If it’s the same thing so many others see. If it was ever there in the first place. Maybe I’ve neglected it somehow. Maybe now it’s festering and decomposing, beyond saving. This whole time, the juice of its decay spilling throughout my being. Maybe it’s dead. Maybe dormant.
I hear him chuckle and ask me, “Are you crying? Has no one wanted to see what’s inside you before?”
His hands are wet with my tears and spit. Thumbs are still pressing on my molars, my tongue fighting. For an instant, I can clearly see his eyes, as if illumination came up through my throat, the briefest of sparks from something within me. I gasp out, best I can, “Did you see it?”
He lets go of me and my phone stops buzzing. The darkness of the room comes back, or it was always there. My breath hitches and hands tremble as I crawl backward, leaning against the headboard. He just sits up and looks at me for a moment. A smile cuts through the shadow. He’s moving toward me, arms reaching out to grab my face once again. He cups my cheeks and coos, “There’s nothing in you.” He kisses me again, then quickly adds, “Not yet.”