A VDay Play in Five Acts
Prelude.Read the next post.
Act I.
A girl returns from work, high on blue sky and the table of chocolates and pink punch that was set up for bikers on the Hawthorne Bridge. The girl picks through the recently arrived package from her ex, sweetly assembled but a reminder nonetheless that done is done, and she cries just a little bit and listens to Glenn Gould. She considers the options for her evening: mac n’ cheese with the Jane Austen dvd ominously chosen for her by Netflix, or getting the fuck out of the house at all costs. She chooses the latter.
Act II.
The girl heads down to a poorly named local coffee shop she loves – a shop always full of people sitting alone together. The sort of place where being alone on National I’m Not Alone Day will not feel conspicuous. She orders food before realizing that half the seating has been cordoned off for a couples dinner, which seems really unkind for such a single hipster haven, like closing AA on New Year’s. The girl grudgingly enjoys her smoked Gouda panini with caramelized onions and thinly sliced pears.
Act III.
Questioning her earlier resilience, the girl beelines towards her bedroom. Two blocks away she realizes the enormous potential of some dramatic loneliness. While not actually a masochist, she often prefers feeling bad to feeling nothing. She does a one eighty and heads back to Belmont. She sits on a stool at a bar and drinks a drink and giggles to herself, I am drinking whiskey alone at a bar on Valentine’s Day. I wish I had a cigarette. She notices a guy sitting alone nearby and asks How’s your evening going? and he says FineYours?, just that, and looks away, and leaves to smoke out front. And she thinks, You are an ass. You are the only person sitting alone at this bar on Valentine’s Day and a cute girl in tall pink-striped socks comes in and sits right next to you and throws you this opening, and you’ve got nothing. She clinks the ice around in her glass and downs the rest and leaves.
Act IV.
Giving up yet again, the girl is on her way home when she passes another coffee shop with an open mike in progress. She stands staring in the window when a man coming out stops right in the doorway and says What a winning smile. He is not hitting on her. He is fifty at least and he smiles back and heads down the block. She realizes that she is smiling, and that she is in fact having a fairly good time overall. That may be the high point of my night, thinks the girl. She is wrong.
Act V.
After sipping tea for the last few open mike performers, the girl feels she has given it a valiant effort. She goes home at last. In her living room her housemates are assembling to hit a club. She banishes any lingering plans for Persuasion. She puts her phone and her ID in her skirt pocket and gets on her bike. At the club she is being introduced to friends of friends of housemates when she spots a guy at the end of the bar. He is alone and sipping a drink in a familiar way, but he doesn’t look unhappy. I really haven’t been uncomfortable enough times yet tonight, thinks the girl. Who are you waiting for? she asks the guy. Coworkers, he replies. An answer we can work with. She asks more questions and he answers more, and then he asks questions too. Where are your coworkers? she asks after time has passed. They’re probably here because my phone has been buzzing in my pocket for a while now, he says. This, thinks the girl, is a lovely answer. Do you want to check? asks the girl. Not really he says. This, thinks the girl, is a lovely answer too. Then he asks her to dance, and this, thinks the girl, is brave. And they dance till the bar closes. And this, thinks the girl, will do nicely.
posted by tortaluga @ 11:43 AM
2 Comments:
thats rad. just that. and It makes me smile.
Nicely done, in many senses.
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