I sleep for a few hours, much less than my normal, and then I clean the apartment. Laundry. Dishes. Scrub the bathroom tile until my knuckles ache. I rearrange my records by year instead of alphabetically, then rearrange them back because year order is pretentious and I’m not that person. I make popcorn and it tastes like every other batch of popcorn I’ve made for years and I wonder, briefly, what Zoe eats for dinner. Probably something her mom made. Probably something that smells like a kitchen that’s been loved for years.
I stop wondering.
I text Vanessa.
can we move the next session up?
V: to when
this week
V: i’m booked solid through saturday. what’s the rush?
no rush. just ready to finish the koi.
V: tuesday work? I'll fit you in.
tuesday works
I put my phone down. The koi on my forearm is healing, the skin tight and itchy under the lotion, and I look at it and think about Zoe saying “it’s gorgeous” and tracing it withher eyes and not touching it, not reaching across the bar, just looking with that open face of hers that hides nothing.
I’m standing in my apartment with nothing to do, which never happens, because I’m always either working or sleeping or sitting in Vanessa’s chair, and the empty time is filling with things I don’t want it to fill with.
I go for a walk before work.
I don’t go for walks. I walk to work and I walk home and sometimes I walk to Iron Lily. I don’t walk for the sake of walking because walking without a destination is aimless and I don’t do aimless. But I’m outside and moving and the evening air is warm and the neighborhood is doing its evening thing, people on porches, kids on bikes, the ice cream truck parked at the corner playing its off-key song.
I walk past Anthem. The neon is off. The door is locked. Through the window I can see the bar in the dim light, the stools pushed in, the bottles faced, everything in its place. My place. Mine in every way that matters even if Carl’s name is on the license.
I keep walking. Past the bodega. Past the laundromat with the blue sign. I walk until the streets start to feel less like mine and more like someone else’s, and I realize I’ve walked into the part of the neighborhood where the houses have front yards and the porches have swings and the whole block smells like someone’s dinner.
I don’t know which house is Zoe’s. I don’t want to know. I’m not walking to her house. I’m just walking. The fact that I walked in this direction means nothing. I turn around.
On the way back I pass the firehouse. Station 11. Red brick, bay doors closed now, the number painted in white. I’vewalked past it a hundred times and never thought about it. It was just the fire station. Now I look at it and see a building full of people who won’t let a twenty-two-year-old girl in, and I think about Zoe sitting in that empty bay listening to a call she couldn’t answer, and I swallow hard and keep walking.
I walk home. I shower. I go to work.
The bar is open and busy and I pour drinks and make change and manage the room and everything is normal. A woman at the end of the bar flirts with me. She’s my age, dark hair, tattoo on her wrist, and she’s doing the lean, the one where she angles her body toward me and plays with the straw in her drink and laughs at things that aren’t funny. I recognize the choreography. I’ve done it a hundred times. She’ll stay until close and I’ll lock up and we’ll walk to her place or mine and it’ll be good, simple, clean.
“Another round?” I ask her.
“If you’re pouring.”
I pour. She smiles. I smile back and it doesn’t reach wherever smiles are supposed to reach because I can feel the difference between a real one and a performance, and this is a performance.
She’s pretty. She’s interested. Three weeks ago I would have already made a decision about tonight. But three weeks ago a girl hadn’t walked into my bar and ordered oblivion and gotten ginger ale instead, and three weeks ago I didn’t know what it felt like to have someone sayit matters to me tooand mean every syllable of it with their entire ridiculous face.
“Last call,” I say at 1:45.
The woman takes the hint. She leaves her number on a napkin. I throw it away after she’s gone and feel nothing about it, which tells me everything.
I close the bar alone. The routine. Glasses, register, mop, bottles. The playlist is on shuffle and it lands on “Don’t Lose Touch” because I left it in the queue and the algorithm decided tonight was the night to play it and the universe has a sense of humor I don’t appreciate.
I listen to it. The whole thing. Standing behind the bar with a rag in my hand at two in the morning, Laura Jane Grace asking me not to lose touch with what made me who I am, and I think about a girl who found this song on her own and asked me to play it in my bar and then walked out into the night and said the truest thing anyone has said to me in years and I let her go.
I let her go because that’s what I do. I let people go. I’m clear about it. I tell them upfront. I’m not the dating kind. I’m not the one you bring home. I’m the one you have a good night with and then you leave and the boundary holds and nobody gets hurt because nobody gets close enough for hurt to be possible.
Zoe got close. She didn’t push or pry or demand. She just kept showing up and being herself and asking questions and listening to the answers and one night she said a sentence that walked right through every wall I’ve built and sat down on the other side like it belonged there.
