I sit in the corner, fingers wrapped around a glass like it’s the last thing holding me to this world, nursing whiskey that burns just enough to remind me I’m still here, still breathing, though sometimes I wonder why.
The bar’s a dim escape, neon flickering like a heartbeat that’s almost out of rhythm, smoke hanging low like the weight of all the things I try to forget— villages and gunfire, the sound of helicopters cutting through a sky that never felt like home.
Afghanistan’s a lifetime away, but it clings to me like the sweat of those days, the heat still rising from the cracked mountain ground into my dreams.
I came back, but a part of me stayed, lost somewhere in the dust of a Kabul no one talks about anymore.
I’m down to my last dollar, everyone knows it— the bartender’s already given me that look, the one that says it’s time to move on, but where to?
There’s nowhere else to go, not when the words won’t come, not when the muse I’m searching for is buried beneath layers of silence and memory.
I came here to write, to let the words cut and bleed something of meaning something that makes sense of the chaos spinning in my head, but all I’ve got is this glass and a cheap pen that’s run dry.
The paper in front of me stays blank, mocking me with the weight of all the stories I can’t find the words for.
Maybe it’s the whiskey, or maybe it’s the noise of too many voices talking about nothing that matters, but I’m drowning here, trying to grasp at something, anything, to pull me back from the edge.
I take one last sip, the burn going down smooth and bitter, and stare out into the haze of the bar, wondering if maybe the muse isn’t something you find, but something that finds you, in the quiet moments, in the spaces between the shots and the silences.
For now, it’s just me and the glass, the weight of the world in a bar that doesn’t care, and the hope that maybe, there’s still a story left to tell.
That was amazing my friend.
Poignant.