We occupied the kitchen together in a silence that should have been awkward, given that it was 2 a.m. and we were both in our underwear and neither of us had planned to be there. Oddly, it felt like a room we’d been meeting in for years without knowing it.
“Can’t write?” he asked.
I looked at him.
I hadn’t told him about the manuscript, not directly, not in conversation. He knew I wrote because of the laptop and the late hours and the way I sometimes emerged from my room with the disoriented expression of a man who’d been underwater, but I hadn’t explained what I was writing or why. He hadn’t asked. The not-asking had been one of the things about him that I appreciated most, because most people asked. Most people wanted to know what the quiet man was doing alone in his room at midnight. That wanting felt like a hand reaching forsomething I wasn’t ready to give.
Benji hadn’t reached.
He’d just noticed.
And waited.
“Can’t write,” I confirmed.
He nodded, as if this were a sufficient answer, as if the entire complicated architecture of grief and memory and creative paralysis could be adequately communicated in two words and did not require further excavation at 2 a.m. over chamomile tea and a mixing bowl of cereal.
“Can’t sleep,” he said, offering his own two words in exchange.
“The shift?”
“The shift, yeah, but not just the shift. It’s this thing where my body is exhausted and my brain didn’t get the memo. Everything’s still running. I can feel the bar in my arms, you know? It’s like muscle memory. The reaching and the pouring and the smiling. It takes a while for all of it to power down.”
I knew.
Not from bartending, but from surgery.
The hours after a difficult operation, when my hands were still and my body was done, but my mind kept replaying the procedure, running the tape backward and forward, checking for errors, looking for the moment where a different choice might have produced a different outcome. It was the inability to let go of something your body had finished but your brain hadn’t released.
“Surgeons call it ‘the loop,’” I said. “When you can’t stop replaying a procedure after it’s done.”
“The loop.” He pointed his spoon at me. “That’s exactly what it is. Except instead of replaying a surgery, I’m replaying every conversation I had tonight and wondering if the guy in the green shirtwho ordered two bourbons and didn’t talk to anyone was actually okay or if I should have checked on him harder.”
That wasn’t what I expected. He served drinks in a bar. He wasn’t a therapist.
“Did you check on him?”
“I sent Jacks over with a plate of Rod’s wings and a casual comment about the basketball game. The guy started talking. He was going through a divorce. He stayed until closing and tipped forty percent.”
“Then you did your job.”
“I did my job for that guy, but there’s always another guy. There’s always someone at the bar who’s holding it together by their fingernails and trying to make it look like they’re just having a drink. My job is to see them, and some nights I’m not sure I’m seeing all of them.”
He said this without drama, without the performative intensity he brought to his stories about Post-it notes and kitten escapes. He said it as a fact he’d been carrying for a while that had gotten heavy enough to set down.
“You can’t see all of them,” I said.
“I know.”
“Trying to see all of them will break you.”
“I know that, too.” He swirled his spoon in the cereal. “Doesn’t stop me from trying.”
We sat with that for a minute.
The kitchen hummed with the low sounds of a sleeping apartment. Potato snored from the couch. The fridge whirred. The clock above the stove ticked despite how I’d never gotten a replacement battery so it would keep correct time.
“What do you write about?” he asked.
