Nursing My Drink

"So what can I get you?" the bartender asks me, her eyes glazing over with ill-attention and a little frustration as she does what everyone else does, which is look through me and past me to the next person they can deal with.

I get it, especially in this situation. I mean I'm sitting at the bar and I'm taking up a stool and I've nursed my way through maybe two drinks all night. That's a net loss to her, since even my most generous tip could almost certainly be surpassed by having my seat filled by two or three other people over the course of the night. But being that I've never really had much of a stomach for **** I'm frankly taking a chance as it is with how much I've had.

"I'm still good," I manage weakly, putting on a smile that isn't reflected or even acknowledged in turn from her, "If you don't mind."

She shrugs and I glance past her at the mirrored back of the bar behind her. By this point in the night the birthday song has long wrapped up and the celebrants have all straggled out of the bar over the night bit by bit. The birthday girl herself is still here, one of her dutiful friends a little ways away watching to make sure that the man who has by now all but taken her home is going to treat her right on her most special of days. I try not to let the bitterness rise as I take another slow sip of my drink and wait to be just left alone.

But the bartender doesn't leave me alone.

"I'm not about to kick you off that seat, you've well earned it by sitting in it all night I guess. And to be honest I don't do the kicking in this place. Billy'll have you out on your ass twenty minutes past last call, which is now. So if you want to make the most of that drink and actually get it done before you gotta be out of here I'd pick up the pace, friend. Sound good?"

I nod, anything to get her to leave me alone, and then the moment she does I abandon the seat anyways, dropping a handful of crumpled bills on the countertop to try to make up for things before pulling my coat a little tighter around myself and heading out into the cold.

It feels like it gets colder earlier in the year these days. It feels like the cold gets a little more intense, bites a little deeper in beneath the layers and settles in until it feels like it's jabbing in tiny little needles that almost reach your bones. I was never a fan of the cold and I'd always sworn that after school I'd move someplace warmer but clearly that didn't work out. Clearly giving up on that dream was just yet another in a long line of dreams abandoned in favor of the easiest possible path in life.

Take the first job that's offered, even if it's not in the city you want to live in. Before that take the easy way out, dropping the major I loved halfway through first year to focus on something that would make me more marketable and employable. In between and before and after just fall into a pattern of making the decision that feels like it should be the right decision, that the world tells me is the right decision, and wonder all the time in the back of your head whether maybe things would be different if you had a second chance.

Because right now on my birthday all I'm wondering is how things would have changed if I'd had a second chance.

The bar is maybe ten minutes away from my basement apartment, down a street lined with bars and always spilling over with people on a night like this. I pass through the crowd with a practiced ease, dodging around them like it's a dance I've done a dozen times before because it absolutely is. I've walked this road and been in this place, alone and sober and isolated in the middle of a crowd. I know how to make my way to the point where I can navigate almost with my eyes closed, almost by feel alone, as I turn down corners and take alleyway shortcuts barely even looking up from the spot right in front of my feet and, as seems to always be common in moments like this, it's only when something changes that I realize that I'm not where I'm supposed to be.

It's far too late before I realize and once I do I'm in the midst of the last place I ever expected to be.

For a limited time you can join my Patreon for only $2 and get access to over a month's worth of new pages of My Second Chance as well as SEVEN FULL STORIES with a new one every month! Join here: https://www.patreon.com/SophiePert