"Emptiness sets in
Another night chasing ghosts
Nothing fills the void"
"I heard you were back in town," I heard the voice from behind me and turned to see who it was.
The person I saw seemed familiar but in a different sort of way. She had grown up over the past years but still remained the same in a way. I smiled a small smile and turned back to my booze.
"For a little while," I said as I slammed back the shooter of Tequila. I had two more lined up. Why should I pay any attention to Miss Popular when she'd known me for more than fifteen years and never paid me any attention in all that time?
But seeing her only brought the pain even closer to the surface now. Miss Popular, whose actual name was Jacqueline, had been Renee's closest friend.
Yes, Renee
, my soul cried out quietly.
Why did you have to leave me? Why did you have to go?
But then again that question was one that she, the only love whom I had ever known, could not answer. It was not as if she had left of her own volition.
Seeing her high school friend only made it harder. This was partially the reason why I had stayed away all that time, coming home only to bury her. This was my home. There were too many lingering memories...things that would never go away...the theater where I took her on a date...the road that we used to drive to get to the lake on the weekends...the park where I would lay with my head on her lap, reading her poetry during the springtime...
So many glimpses that were in living color, yet would never leap from the canvas of my memory. They would never be again.
So why should I come home?
My only home was solitude. My only friend was the loneliness that seemed to surround me. And the tequila comforted me.
"Depths of loneliness
Forever trapped in my hell
Can you hear my cries?"
I smiled ironically after chasing the Tequila with a beer. I turned to see that she was still standing there. The woman was interrupting the drunk that I had planned. Shaking my head, I turned back to the bar and slammed back the next shooter in line, feeling the effects of the alcohol washing over me. I loved that feeling. It was comfortable for me.
It seemed like the only warmth that I felt these days came from the bottle. I shivered at the thought, trying to remember what it was like to feel something else beside the cold emptiness. I couldn't recall what it was life. That was what life had turned into for me.
Pissing me off all the more, Jacqueline sat down next to me and stared at me. I ignored her. I took a long pull from my beer as I spent another night chasing ghosts.
"I was so sorry when I heard about Renee," Jacqueline said quietly as she made herself comfortable inside my silent requiem without an invitation. I remained silent. Why were words necessary?
"I went to her funeral and saw you from the back before I slipped away," she said with what seemed like a tear in her eye. "It seemed so private."
She fell silent. "I didn't want to intrude."
Why did I even bother coming home?
I asked myself. I had been gone for five years and now that I was back, I felt like a stranger in a strange land. I didn't belong here anymore. This was no longer my home.
All my supposed friends were mere strangers and family were only those with the same last name as mine. My friends were waiting for me on the field of battle. My family now was waiting for me in the foxhole for my return. That was my home now. That was where I belonged.
"I'm a stranger here now
Nobody knows the ghosts haunting me
Let me return home to war"
As I slammed the empty shot glass onto the bar, Jackie-Jacqueline-picked up the remaining shooter and tossed it back in one swallow. I looked at her stunned. She was always a little miss goodie two-shoes. She never drank and never swore. She had the brains of a rocket scientist and the looks of a model. She was perfect. Why the hell she was sitting next to me in a dingy beer and shot bar was beyond me.
But there she was and she wasn't going away.
Jacqueline slammed the shot glass down on the bar.
"Looks like all your booze is gone now, Jimmy," she said with a faraway look in her eyes. It was a look that I was familiar with. I'm sure that I've had it before; and I recognized it from the faces of other soldiers, warriors, who somehow found a way to escape in their mind to somewhere else, if even for just a moment.
Before I could order up another line of shooters and chasers, Jacqueline's voice broke in again. "I got booze back at my house. It's free and you can crash on my couch."
Leaning over to her slowly, I examined her in a near-drunk state without speaking a word. Her bottom lip trembled under the scrutiny. Never before, I thought, had she ever been so studied. She seemed uncomfortable but she did not move.
"And what's in it for you?" I asked quietly with sarcasm and bitterness. I had grown suspicious in my age. I would have laughed had I thought about it more. I was only twenty-four, but combat has a way of aging a man.
"Maybe I don't want to be alone," she said so quietly, I could barely hear her.
When her hand reached out slowly, tentatively, and touched my cheek, it felt like fire touching the ice of my skin, the first sunlight to shine upon an icy field after a long cold winter. But even before I could analyze her touch, she drew back as if the touch burned.
Unsteadily I stood up and she followed suit.
Twenty minutes later I found myself in her apartment that stood atop an old storefront on Main Street. What I found was not what I had expected. While she went to the kitchen to get the bottle of booze, I explored, for the first time seeing someone whom I'd known for more than fifteen years.
I could tell her favorite color was green. So was mine. Her couch was a deep forest green. Her border on her walls was green as well. It looked comfortable. It felt warm here. Somehow I could tell that it wasn't simply the heat from the booze that I had been drinking.
What amazed me most were the books that were on the two five-shelf book cases next to her computer desk. All the titles and authors were familiar to me. Rudyard Kipling. Edgar Allan Poe. Emily Dickinson.
Canterbury
Tales
