That Time I went to CA for a wedding--the end

              

  After the party had ended, and the music had died, we did what every real good honest to God reveler does: we headed back to the bar from the night before. Like first love and a first kiss, it’s generally best not to try and go back to the bar for the second night because it will inevitable pale in comparison. What at first blush seemed to be quaint, turns out to just be dingy. The feeling you had the night before, that perhaps, for a moment, you owned the world, well, on a second look it turns out to have been induced by alcohol. In short, the bar, the David, the Granitas you had, all suffer on a second look by not being so intensely new, so satisfying.

And yet, we headed back to the bar for a second night. And, just as I expected, it was just as amazing as the first night. It turns out that a bar is just a place, a tiny particle in this vast expanse of the universe, space, virtually undefined. What makes the space significant, or insignificant, is being. It’s you; it’s me; it’s all of us together. Amongst the tiny specks, of tiny particles, in the middle of the unknown, we are the meaning makers.

It’s the first wedding that I’ve been at where the bride and groom joined the guests at the bar for the after party. In that sense, the evening was sanctioned in a kind of way that it wouldn’t have been otherwise. It’s kind of like being at the Presidential ball where the President actually visits. We are supposed to be there. Sadly, the karaoke is only on Thursday nights. Though a lot of people seem excited that we’ll have the jukebox, I can tell, deep down, that they already miss my rendition of Party in the USA and are secretly wondering where the evening can possibly go that will be good. They don’t say it, but it’s just one of those things that you “feel” in your bones, like the truth of your own being at the center of the universe.

In the dark of the bar, we listen to the songs chosen by strangers. And in the way of all people of every tribe and nation, we complain about the songs they are playing because they are not “our” songs. Everyone is buying drinks though I’m not partaking by now, besides a brief sip of Fireball. I am watching the evening unfold now as if it were a movie. A few of us are sitting on the couch, talking about the mistakes we made when we were younger and foolish. Eventually, we settle into a booth and take pictures with a skull, with each other, with this particular night. And I would say to you that the evening was like a beer commercial, except that thought is insidious and it is the beer commercial that is merely attempting to capture the ephemera of this evening, as if by stringing together a few photos you could string together the many nights we’ve all shared before, more numerous than the stars, uncountable in number and more luminous. We are strung together by these nights and hours, hanging out in the noisy light of a burning star. We are brief, and we are beautiful.

                These are, as I’ve made clear, damn fine people, and we are having a very good time. Eventually our songs start to come up on the juke box. Wait around long enough and things will go your way. We dance around this small bar, pushing back chairs and couches, to Florida-Georgia Line, and we circle our arms together around the bride and groom and sing Wagon Wheel while they twirl around between us. It seemed like the perfect way to end the weekend, arms around one another, singing in a dive bar to an old country sounding song, as if we could go on this way forever. 

                Of course, I still had to get home. To their credit, everyone’s wife and girlfriend swore up and down that I should just stay the night in the hotel room with them that I wouldn’t be a bother at all. To all of my friend’s credit they said, “Oh no, I think he’ll be fine.” I was fine. I drove home in the dark, thinking about the weekend that I’d spent, happy.

The hollow feeling of leaving stays with me over Nevada, and clear through to Colorado. We are on the ground for a while, but the feeling doesn’t abate. As we travel east, the sun fades, an orange line above an endless line of bruised clouds. For a while, I distract myself with the internet. I’ve never paid for internet before on a flight because I come from humble beginnings, and I think paying for the internet is one of those things you don’t do, like murdering someone, but I make an exception. Online, you can briefly forget that you are alone, but eventually the plane descends and the feeling starts to return. It is hollow, and yet it aches as I am very hungry.

The cab ride home is dark and mostly quiet. The cabby and I talk about his children, what hours he works, what hours I work, my children. He takes the way that I’d have told the other cabby to take, and it turns out that the first guy wasn’t ripping me off like I thought. The two roads that diverged, one leading through the woods, turn out to be roughly equidistant. The cab doesn’t have a video screen, so I am not subjected to images of people inexplicably shooting each other for thirty minutes, though it’s kind of a mystery that I’d like to unravel.

At home, I ask the cabby if I can pay with credit card, and I can tell that he really wants me to pay with cash. I tip generously, assuming that it will make up for using a credit card. The brief intersection of our lives concluded, he drives back into the night, a flicker of taillights, an image that I can only conjure up because I have sat down just now to think of that night.

The feeling is gnawing though and is something akin to hunger. I am not, I think, dealing with existential loneliness, but a visceral type of loneliness that can only come with leaving behind those with whom we are very close. The house is dark, and I slip into bed without turning on any lights. My teeth will wait for morning. I don’t remember my dreams, but I can tell that the feeling sits with me, like a patient grandmother at her knitting, while I sleep.

In the morning, I awake and walk out of bed, due at work in an hour or so. In the hallway, my wife has our youngest, a ten month old, held tightly against her rib cage, balancing on her hip. “Your son missed you,” she said, and it is when he reaches out with his right hand and grazes my face, before going back to madly chewing on his blanket that the feeling starts to go away. I am home. I am loved.