The Lonely End of the Bar

  He wasn't an unpleasant man by any standards. Polite almost to a fault, quietly sipping a whisky and a pint at the end of the bar most nights, he almost blended into the ambiance of this local pub. He greeted a the regulars he knew by sight, sometimes sending a pint or a shot down the bar if he felt someone needed it, he had a sense for it. He could carry conversations long into the night, no matter the state of inebriation, he was good at prodding others to talk about themselves so he could concentrate on filling the quiet in his head with their lives. He didn't think much of his own anymore, not that he was depressed or anything like it, he just sort of felt his existence had been set into a routine for so long that it wasn't a matter of choice anymore, but a deep rooted part of who he was.

  The thing about where he sat at the bar was that there could only ever be one person sitting next to him, it was a conscious decision he had made a long time ago when he found this place that was stumbling distance to his home. He didn't mind a one on one chat but eschewed anything too loud or too deep into his own circumstances. Nestled up against the wall, he held onto that bar rail with a light grip, tethered to reality even as the liquid dreams filled his nights. It was a long, slow roll to his own personal closing time, he never lingered long past 10, still aware enough of his single responsibility to make it to work on time the next day. He took the functional part of his life as the price he had to pay to get to his first shot of whisky every night, a necessary evil that would one day come to an end and then he could find another thing to occupy the time between his last drink from the night before to his first one the next day. 

  He had rules for himself, not written down in stone, but so honed and cultivated from  years of practice that they were unspoken and all but unbreakable. He never drank before work, nor immediately after it, for whatever it was worth, he felt this was some kind of compromise. He never pounded a beer or a shot, always taking measured sips, almost savouring it as time slowed and the weight of everyday living slid off his shoulders and into another round. He never turned down a pint and always was there for the people who thought of him as a friend when they needed a kind word or a sympathetic ear. While he was neither of those things, he had carefully crafted a narrative and appearance of both to the lengths of which civil society demanded. He wasn't loud and always tipped, he knew that these two things weren't important to anyone but the folks behind the bar and they were the closest thing to family he'd had in a long time. 

  He had become a practiced drunk, one who's funeral would be well attended by the people who thought they knew him, playing his favourite songs at the wake and tossing back shots and pints in his honour even as the memory of who he really was faded into tales told less frequently as their lives carried on. Someone else would now sit at the loneliest end of the bar...never knowing the man who called it his existed, the spot just another chair now. 

fin.