A friend texts and asks if it’s true: Do writers write drunk and edit sober? I tell her what I know. Those are drinkers with writing problems. I can’t write drunk. All that will do for me is limit my vocabulary. But I suppose it’s a method to loosen the tongue, release the tension and anxiety that often comes part and parcel with bearing one’s soul to the page.

But it is Friday night. These are my coordinates. I am in this bar with all strangers.

The bartender knows me. I recognize a regular, the waitstaff. It is the beginning of patio season and there are people laughing outside. I sit at the bar inside in the hope of being left alone. Yet, I am here to be among others so that I am not at home alone at the end of the long work week.

Across the bar, there are women eating dinner together, buddies drinking, a gay couple on a night out. There is a lonely, run-down man waiting for takeout. My side is full of solitary people. Exhausted, broken, searching- and I am the only woman, my face buried in this journal. It is uncommon and I get noticed. I’m not here to drink and I’m not on the make. Occasionally, they are suspicious that I am writing about them.

What of it.

I don’t want to cook dinner. I am lonely and trying to have some company outside of my home and my cats. I’m working through my feelings about all that’s happened in my life over the past year: mom’s cancer, career upheaval, casual sex… what a mess.

People don’t talk to me. I actually don’t want them to. How many times have I tried to fit in and failed? I do not accept their social pecking order. See and be seen. I don’t really understand the unspoken rules of human social interaction. Spit it out asshole. What are these weird social constructs, weird class issues, weird ideas about who has and who has not, what’s in and what’s out?

I’m out. Period.

At times, I feel everyone’s defeat, the long slide off broken dreams into mediocrity, the surrender to aging and lost purpose. Longing for days past. Occasionally, people will try to figure out who I am. I have been asked if I write for the paper by fame seekers. I’ve sat in places where it is not uncommon to see local celebrities. Who are you? No one. But I am trying to go for it as if writing books meant anything.

I am clearly a professional here for happy hour on the occasional Friday. The bartender likes me. I tip. No trouble and deep in thought. But also, he thinks I’m cool. Maybe he’s a writer too or a musician or an artist of some other flavor. Like it or not, I have become a regular, a neighborhood fixture. I am part of the scene.

Lady, loner, writer.

-Copyright C.M. Mounts, April 2019