Meeting someone wasn't in the cards. Imogen Reed was busy experiencing the destabilization of words. Staring at them long enough, letters began to lose all meaning. The idea that this symbol or that corresponded with a sound became unintelligible. A squiggle here or there becomes a phoneme or a sound or conveys an idea evaporated like steam, only to condense on the back of the brain pan as storm clouds and confusion. That an S is an S, contrary to the tautological framing, lost signification. Nothing remained as it once appeared. Every letter of a paragraph became a glyph or a rune from a forgotten civilization because in staring all was forgotten and everything once again made alien.
She leaned her head into her hand, staring at students' finals in a bar while waiting for her drink. Even the best ones struggled to look like writing on the second day of pushing through intro-level papers from groups of mostly freshmen. They meant well, or at least they meant to get it right, but they always picked the most transparently easy option from the choices she gave them. If she never read a comparison of the ideas of happiness between Aristotle and Mill, she would have died a happy woman. And yet, like something as crooked in her logic as an S, she committed to keeping the easier questions instead of the heart.
Her glasses lay at the bottom of the next paper in her queue. She tapped it with the cap of her pen. Her eyes, colored with her envy for the people in the bar to socialize and there on dates, just kept looking at the words hoping they would cohere back into things she could understand. With an arrhythmic tap, she drowned them out as much as she could. To ignore the people around her did not put the world back together. She could stop up her ears and blind herself further than just removing her glasses, but none of that would make the papers appear properly again.
The heel of her hand pushed her chin up. The bottles behind the counter had prettier designs on the scribbles and a part of her brain could tell what the words said on sight, but she couldn't read them actively. And then her world was intruded on by the arrival of a sour beer. The arm that put it down was covered in near-black hair but had some clear tone and muscle. "Here ya go," the bartender said with his voice lilting.
Imogen stared blankly for a moment, unable to process information and only seeing things in abstractions and semiotics. "Thank you," she said in a low voice, barely registering above other people talking. She let go of her cheek and gathered up her glasses to put them back on and at least the world further from her became more visible.
"Seems like you're doing something super interesting there, huh?" Peter had on a smile behind his rust-red beard that gave more width to his narrow face. The relaxed brown curls of his hair fell on one side of his forehead, but his hair was maybe four inches long if Imogen had to guess.
The blonde philosopher sighed. She put down her pen, and finally, the words on the paper made sense to her again. "Oh, yeah. Grading's my favorite part of my job," she smirked.
"Lovely, it seems like you have quite a bit, then. How lucky for you!" The bartender retorted. "Isn't it a bit late in the season for finals?" He folded his arms.
"This class is on the quarter system, semester schools were done a few weeks ago."
"Yeah, I knew they were done a bit ago, 'swhy I asked." Peter tapped the crook of his arm with his fingers. "What's the class?"
He made Imogen smile. She stretched her spine to pull away from her work and looked at the nighttime dark eyes of the bartender. She picked up her beer and hid her mouth behind it. "Intro to Philosophy, nothing special."
"Now see, I'm trying to leave, ya know, this shit," the bartender pointed at the ceiling and swirled his finger, "so I've actually been back in for my undergrad, but I haven't had an opportunity to take a philosophy class."
"They're good classes. I mean, it's about how you think more than anything." Imogen picked up one of her papers and flopped it around while she spoke. "I love my friends in STEM, but they just get to give answers or methods for those answers. I have to try to make thinking harder. It's fun, ya know."
She added, "Or at least I love it."
The bartender smiled, "Always good to see someone doing what they love."
"I take it you don't love this job?"
The bartender looked down at the cherry-red wood of the bar and over to the nearest patrons. They were a couple simmering over their drinks, unable to speak to one another. Their bodies were wound like a ripcord waiting for someone to pull it. Even from a few stools over, it was clear to anyone they were playing chicken, daring the other to break the silence and in that way daring the bartender to do the same. "Oh, no," he admitted. "I used to be a chef; I didn't love that either, but this job somehow has less cocaine in front of house than back."
"Well, congrats on keeping your nose clean, then." Imogen raised her glass as a toast.
"Well, tell me about what you're working on. I might have to grab someone a drink, but I've seen you staring at this stuff for a bit." He picked up a glass of water from behind the bar. He grabbed into it with two fingers and scooped out an ice cube. He popped the ice in his mouth. "You seem like you could use the distraction."
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Over an hour had passed. For Peter Rossi, it was supposed to be a full night. Syllables and phonemes became noise at a certain point. To say the same word enough times denatured the sound and returned it to the meaninglessness that all words have absent of a connection to a referent. Though in the normal course of events, the word 'beer' had a clear and distinct meaning, those sounds have a referent vanished just as quickly when repeated in a numbing fashion. Every language, even one's own, could become foreign with enough repetition just as easily as hearing a sound enough, those vibrations coalesced into the amber structure of a beer.
