Shadow

He always sat with his back to me. In the corner booth left of the stage, he was always facing that stage despite the fact there was never anything to see there. It was eternally empty in a way that inspired excitement, as if the show was about to begin - but it never did. The bar was spacious, scarce pieces of mix-matched furniture sporadically clumped around the place. Metal office chairs paired with high stools around ankle endangering oak coffee tables. The place was a mess. There was never that many people there, a few regulars who faded into the darkness surrounding them and I was thankful for that, it gave me a clear view of him.

I favored a seat by the bar, stool facing outwards, my scarlet heels pointed in his direction to show my availability hoping he'd look up and see me - but he never did. He was known only as Shadow around those parts and it was very fitting. In a way we were all shadows there, shapeless figures sipping on solitary drinks, each tormented by one past or another, half lost in a communal smoky haze from a host of lonely cigarettes. Each individual mind plagued by unique troubles sharing combined solace in flowing alcohol. My first visit to this bar was entirely accidental. I ducked in to hide from the increasing December cold outside. Unusually the cold from the outside doesn't reach through to the lost souls in this bar. To me the warmth feels out of place here, adding a homely feeling to our assaulting, isolated ambiance. It seems unlikely that somewhere where death hangs in the air, exhaled breath does not. In this town the cold can be felt in the marrow and the winters sneaks up on the people. They'll get a preview in October, a brief week in which the frost will set in and there'll be a sudden change in the wind, and then summer will return to toy with them as if nothing had transpired. The cold will arrive again to attack around mid-December, catching the folk off guard in show-offish sundresses and khakis. Winds that cut through flesh like arrows through sinew, and pierces from all angles. I'm never caught out with the weather, I always dress for winter - heavy cord jackets atop matted fleece undercoats. Mostly it's to hide the revealing numbers underneath, protect my modesty, but in the winter my overcautious layers have a double use.

Shadow was here on my first chance visit to this bar. I walked in and stood a moment in the threshold waiting to thaw out and the feeling to return to my extremities. As soon as I could feel my toes I walked over to the bar and ordered myself an ironic 'Vodka straight, honey' and then took a seat on the nearest stool. Scanning the room my eyes fell on him, his profile silhouetted by the stage lights. I'm not usually one for cliches, but it was love at first sight. I started coming back at that time weekly and absorbing all I could of him. He'd arrive at roughly 9 every Thursday evening. I'd be in position by the bar from eight thirty, sipping on a martini, my stomach flipping every time the corroded little bell above the door sounded feebly. When he did arrive he'd walk past me to his table at the front. Every week as he sauntered past, eyes fixed with determination to the floor, I'd hold my breath, lips pressed painfully in silent prayer that he'd look up and see me, but again - he never did. He'd then take to his usual seat at the front and order a whiskey. He'd nurse the first sullenly, soundlessly contemplating life, like any man, at any bar, all over this harrowed nation. After the second or third, he'd begin laughing at thin air. An infectious chuckle which rose like a bubble from his chest and burst forth, hitting every wall in the bar and ricocheting right at me; forcing me with a gentle hand to join in. At around midnight he'd reach his peak, singing aloud to the music in his head; fast southern anthems, the words never quite accurate. His emerald eyes twinkling with an excitement mine mirrored. Never without a cigarette between his fingers he'd expel the smoke in perfect rings and I'd watch as they danced above him, expanding at the pace they were floating until they dispersed and died too high to be saved by mortal hand.

Waitresses would come over to take further drinks orders and they'd flirt with him, he'd be polite back and touch their hands, make them laugh but I knew he wasn't interested. Even on the occasions I saw him leave with one I knew it was only because he was growing lonely waiting for me to approach him. Every night as closing creeped closer I'd have an internal battle with myself. Reasoning that it was too soon to introduce myself I'd always go home disappointed. I longed to speak to Shadow, to confirm to him that I was everything he was looking for. I knew I could fix what was broken within him, I could see it there, even from a distance. The dark hand of past regret and blood shed hovering above him. It really showed after his tenth drink. The songs escaping him became less lively, macabre ballads about lost loves and war torn nations. He no longer made shapes with the smoke but instead allowed it to abdicate from his barely parted lips as it wished, or it was expelled with his sighs like the breath of a listless dragon. It was after he reached this stage that he'd usually run out of money for drinks, curse and stagger back past me and out into the desolate night. This was also the time I'd usually foolishly consider, and begrudgingly decide against, approaching him.

I knew one day we'd converse and he'd realize I was what he'd been longing for his whole life in the same climactic moment of crashing recognition I had experienced when my tired eyes first fell upon him. I dreamt of him, his soft half-smile, his gruff whisper telling me he loved me, his large coarse hands exploring my body pulling at the skin stretched over my collar bone, his lips hunting for mine. I thought of him in this way often, but it wasn't just sexual longings I had for Shadow, to me he was everything my father told me I'd never have; love, a family, happiness. Most nights as I watched him I'd become hopelessly lost in exquisite delusions, my eyes glazing over as if a protective film had come down behind my irises to protect my visions from leaking out and exposing me to the acrid world. He laced every thought my mind conjured throughout my empty days. Each emergence of him causing my heart to swell and indanger me of collapsing. If I was brave I'd walk right over to him and take his hand, and blindly lead him running into our future.

It took me nine months of playing shadow to Shadow to actually speak to him. On this particular evening I'd been observing him customarily from my stool by the bar when nature had called and I'd slunk away to the bathroom. I noticed as I was urinating that there was a crude poem carved into the cistern. I giggled at the sloppy rhyming of 'Penis' and 'Hygienist'. After relieving myself I stepped out from the squalid cubicle and was face to face with him. My head began to reel, I felt as if I'd stepped into a paradoxical universe where both vulgar nightmare and purest aspiration merged into one. I stared upon the soft complexion of my love, his face half cast into darkness by the meager light above us. Us, the two of us, standing not even a meter apart, close enough to touch. My eyes searched his for recognition, exploring the deep brown of his irises as if looking for fossils within barren soil. Swiftly they flicked towards his lips, the right corner had raised softly in a warm smile and I knew it was about to happen. I saw our lives lain out before us, like a many pronged road map with two smiling faces leading the way. Everything my existence had the potential to be was created in that hint of a smile, and shattered by what came next.
'Jesus Christ.' He said through snarled lips, a loathsome smirk twisting his features. His empty, judging eyes drank me in, moving up and down my frame. The emerald in them dead. Once such a precious stone, now just polished glass amongst pebbles on a shore. With a mocking chuckle he turned and exited the bathroom, leaving me in my place among the excrement and the stench that accompanied it.

I stood there stunned for what seemed like forever, running the scene I'd just witnessed on a loop behind my shattered protective screen. Searching through my subconscious I found that all the blissful fantasies I'd conjured up had been replaced with that snarl and a cruel realization. The whole affair had been a deviant misconception, a string of romanticised events coupled with an extreme, crippling loneliness had caused me to imagine that Shadow was perfect, and that he was mine. I now realized he was a drunk, a narrow-minded boozer and his kind despised me on principal. I slowly turned to look at myself in the battered bathroom mirror. My eyes explored this man's face as if it wasn't my own but as I blinked so did he and I began to realize why. Heavily made up eyes struggled to adjust to the dim lighting as they slid across my features. A grotesque monster in cheap, smudged lipstick. I ran my fingers through the rough synthetic hair that hung from my head, barely able to feel it at all. I exited the men's room in a daze, kept my eyes to the floor to hide the steadily flowing hot tears of humiliation. Walking out into the dissipated street a familiar cold consumed me, I lit up a cigarette, receiving the smoke into my lungs gladly. I held it in front of me as I walked, a glowing ember of hope and an eventual promise of death - my one friend in the world. I never went back to that bar.