Bittersweet
Just a dark and smoky bar. A place he dreaded when he was smaller - lonely drunkards sitting in the gloom from afternoon until the head was full enough. The way to destroy your life - or to cope with the destroyed life, he thought. But now he was sitting there himself, because there was nowhere else to go to be not alone. Or to be alone among others.When the doctors were leaving with his father, they had asked what to do. 'To do the full program' or to let him go, to pull the plug. His father had turned blue in the afternoon, first the lips and then the arms - just because he was sitting near his father, trying to feed him he noticed on time. No chance if it had happened during the night, no doctors necessary then. The ambulance stood silent for ten minutes before leaving - they tended to intubate people not in front of relatives, he knew.
He pulled his black hood over his head, a chilly air flew in each time someone entered or left. It was a tough winter, with hundreds of people freezing to death. And yet, he couldn't get the picture of his father out of his head. No reason to panic or to cry, it was to be expected, sooner or later. After all he was in his eighties. It had gotten worse over the last years, and each time he had left the city for work, he said silently goodbye. But his father was tough, two strokes survived and coming back up again - so who knows, nobody can tell. Hope never dies...
When to pull the plug? What a question. Hope doesn't help with the answer. His father had signed a paper, telling him his will - but still, how could one really say 'now!'. By now his head had sunk onto the wood of the bar, leaving him staring across in almost apathic manner. He never noticed, when this happened (for him it was just 'thinking deeply'), but anyone sitting across by chance would feel uneasy at least. Noone likes if the guy with a black hood stares at them, even though his glassy eyes saw nothing. Unknowingly he mimicked his father - eyes that never broke through the clouds and mist in his mind for the last weeks.
Without moving the head, he glanced at his beer. A quarter left, time to go soon. Certainly no solutions found with the chin on this bar. Smoky, dark - the same way he looked like, the same way he felt.
"Hey, everything alright?" she said. She had appeared behind him and he half turned to mumble something like "No, thanks.", whatever would lead to the shorter conversation. But he saw her and couldn't help but say "Yes, is ok". Because suddenly it was.
"I saw you for a while already and was wondering whats going on. You want to join me at my table?" This was not supposed to happen. Being picked up by an attractive woman in a bar was rare enough - but by staring into a half empty beer with the chin on the table and the black hood on... where did she come from?
"Yes, of course" was the only answer he could voice. Nothing in the world could make him refuse that offer now - and whilst the troubles were not forgotton it was like they mattered less. They talked about his father and about her daughter recovering from surgery, their future and about life, about lybia and egypt, about hope and how to cope with a relative on the edge of death. In between there were smiles, looks and some compliments as well - which were thanked with glints in the eyes. He couldn't believe his eyes and his ears - as little as he knew her, she was as perfect as possible. Like carved from his dreams. Like...
Against all odds, they almost drowned in each others eyes, the kisses followed, in the bar and on the way to her home. Everything was possible, their families and normal lifes didn't matter, each touch was just sweet, freed of all the weight. They only had this night, these few hours until dawn, when they both would be drawn back into lifes that could never be as bright as these hours in the dark bar.
He kissed her goodbye at the door. His heart almost burst, he did not understand, why he didnt follow her. It was all he longed for, all he desired and all he dreamed of - no strings attached, just some hours of shared lifetime. And yet - he didnt follow.
She insisted on sharing phone numbers - but he felt, the dream would be over in daylight. Maybe better this way, every life could just take a certain amount of complications - even though it was the sweetest of all. He knew he would spend the next days eyeing his phone fruitlessly, waiting for a text or call. So bittersweet - longing to see her again, to see those sparkling eyes, to talk the way they did, to feel those lips...
She didnt call back the day after, but the hospital did. The situation was stable now, the antibiotics seemed to work against the septic shock. No need to answer the question about the plug, instead there returned the hope of him fighting his way back up again.
He felt the relief. But also his disappointment, that it wasn't her calling. Bittersweet.
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