You know how it is. You’re just sitting there. You’ve managed, by a judicious and calculated series of moves, to finally infiltrate the quiet corner with the comfortable seating. Everyone still has at least half of their last drink left. The conversation has reached that warm fuzzy inclusive stage, where it doesn’t take that many words to keep up the momentum – and the occasional empty space is as companionable as it would be if it were filled with the words that everyone is thinking, but that don’t need to be vocalised, to be shared.
Great and pointedly philosophical arguments are slowly formulating in the various minds around the table but, as the talk meanders here and there without touching anything that would make such pronouncements relevant, they recede, unspoken, into the blur of the warm, alcohol incremented friendship that encloses the group within a tangible aura.
No one mentions the thought that stirs, snuffling and grunting softly, in the background. Soon, all this must end. Soon, even the hardened drinkers, with their elbows firmly glued to the bar, will be roused to action. Soon, the harsh winds of reality will blow us all, onward, to real life.
Soon, the bar will close.
Track and Hedge 