Summer Sake
It’s a cool summer evening. The scene opens in a sake bar. It’s his favorite spot.
The atmosphere exudes a quiet confidence. This is a place for all but only those who know come.
The lukewarm light permeates the room and reflects off the wooden bar. Customers sit around on two sides, forming an L shape of seated individuals.
Sitting down. He fails to consider if she likes sake, so he naively suggests the full bottle and she agrees.
The night moves along like a train dancing at dusk. A steady pace going down the tracks.
The first station is an apology. He’s been distant like the distance between the start of this sentence and what would inevitably have to be the end of this sentence.
How does one explain to someone else that you failed them because you failed you. Bad habits kick in and you distance yourself from others because you are distant from yourself. He blames the distance on himself and blames himself on the distance.
She tells him how upset she was and he feels terrible.
The conversation meanders its way past the bottleneck in the stream. The flow no longer split by a boulder in the rapids, returning to business as usual.
The pair next to them look like they’ve been absolutely shellacked. A shellacking that is of their own making from what looks like their third finished bottle of sake and what we later find out is their first edible in twenty-five years. They are celebrating one of their birthdays. The big five-o! He slaps the back of his friend on his left and boasts that he is a year and a day younger than him. And for a year and a day, he will live in once half century while his friend starts in the next half century.
The man on the right raises his voice and laments about his mother. His mother who cancelled their last-minute visit to her house because she didn’t feel put together enough to welcome her family. He goes on to complain that her response was that she could visit him during his birthday. It makes him upset because it’s his day and she can’t dictate what he does on his birthday.
Those words paint a picture of a man whose story runs more layers deep than a portrait done impasto.
The lefty responds with an unrelated story about his family and what seems like a confession that he had been having an affair.
The cacophony of chatter continues and now the tide runs high and they get consumed by the wave of conversation originating from the two strangers.
They quiz them to try and tease out if this is a date or not. Curious to see what she would say, he hesitates on his response in order to hear the start of her answer so that he would quickly catch up to say the same thing at seemingly the same time. She says it’s not a date, which he says a tenth of a second after she starts. Close enough.
He knows it’s not a date but he wonders if she would say something else.
She does most of the talking. She is impressive. The two men are witty but she’s boxing like a southpaw and these two rookies don’t know what hit them. She weaves and bobs between each inquiry and remark while dishing out heat of her own.
At the end of a quartet of sound with one of the four being mute, the conversation returns to a more natural pace. The dialogue drives forward.
One makes a homo-erotic joke about the other. It sounds like banter but feels more like a secret admission of something else.
They keep going until the end of the of the boxing match and the judges unemphatically declare it a split decision. The crowd goes home uninspired.
The airplane has reaching cursing altitude. The turbulence are over and you may now take your seatbelt off. Please enjoy the flight.
The journey reaches its destination.
The two strangers have a falling out. One leaves abruptly and other is left sitting alone.
The boy and the girl remain.
The walls are white and the bar is stacked. The bartender wears a soft smile. Proud of his blonde highlights.
It’s a summer night. He thinks about how such small moments can be so remarkable. Like shooting stars.
