From a Bar Stool

I'm swiveling around on a bar stool when I see her. I've seen her around before, always on the arm of a guy, never the same one twice. Tonight's the first night I've ever seen her alone. She's sitting in the corner booth, the one by the window, a half glass of something in front of her. Smoke from the half-finished cigarette in her hand curls through the air like a sun-drunk cat. The look on her face seems out of place, it's normally seen in malls and grocery stores on mothers with two or three screaming kids in tow. It's the look that says the person wearing it can see time slipping away, can feel the weight of years piling up on their shoulders. I take a last drag on my own cigarette, holding the smoke in my lungs as I stub out the remains, and I watch as she takes a drink of whatever's in the glass in front of her. Part of me wonders if she even registered what she was drinking, part of me knows that she's too far in the past to do anything but operate of auto-pilot. The lights are on but no one's home. I open the door, the influx of chilled air making the cigarette smoke trapped by the ceiling swirl like fog when someone passes through it. I look back at her one more time and see the look in her faraway look in her eyes. She's so far back in the past I wonder if she'll ever be able to see the present again.