18th
The Time Traveler’s Dupe
The wormhole was waiting, waiting all along in front of the bar and the random bookshelves where you bought me that first drink as I came to meet you shaking from across the room. It was waiting in the back room where the calligraphy bleeds into the slow, noncommittal smile of the cocktail waitress and her mummified line of red uniforms poised like dancing girls priming to break free. It reflects back there in the bathroom mirror too, where at the end of a long night someone else smiles back at me.
After so many years I become a gremlin who tramps from barstool to bookshelf to get cheap thrills, rubbing up against spines. A dorsal shiver from a hard copy of Keats and his earnest reader; a herniated disc from the bureaucrat lipsynching in iambic pentameter while making a study of his watch. Both, you know, were you. Always the ritual of cigars and cognac that belong to other people, the boom! boom! boom! of the disco music, and the swirls of smoke which burn tree rings into outstretched, aging palms. Old men cleave to the perfumed roses of much younger companions, watching them trace circles of I-love-you-nots with long straws into fluted champagne glasses.
When we said goodbye it felt like the crumbling of book-ends. It has happened so many times. It is even happening right now.
But tonight in this place it doesn’t seem to matter. You are sitting on the bar stool wondering when I will walk in. And I, I am always halfway there to meet you from across the room.
