My own damn fault

I had been there a long time. Long enough to forget why I stayed. Long enough to get a tattoo I did not remember choosing. It was well done. That much was true.

Mexican cutie.

I looked for the salt shaker and never found it. A man can spend a day looking for small things. It gives the day shape. People said a woman was to blame. I believed them once. Then I did not. In the end it seemed better to leave blame alone.

Hairy-backed old men wander through the gift shops now as I suppose I once did without noticing it, pausing in doorways, watching the young women along the shore with expressions that are not entirely desire and not entirely regret, and listening to them I hear the same conversation repeated beneath different voices, each speaking of the life he will someday begin, the work he will finally leave, the body he will reclaim, the liberty waiting just beyond one more obligation, as though hope itself were not another habit capable of becoming as comfortable and as imprisoning as any porch swing left long enough beneath the same roof.

Return tickets protrude from drooping Hawaiiwan shirt pockets like tree roots from a dirt trail. They’ll be back on the job at 8:30 Monday, after retrieving the Sheltie from the shelter.

My sandal broke on the road home. I stepped on a sharp piece of metal and cut my heel. I walked anyway.

There was liquor in the blender. Ice waited beside it. Soon there would be a cold drink in my hand. It would not fix anything. It would make the afternoon easier. Sometimes that was enough.

The sea was still there. My last shaker of youth was still gone. Yes, and some people claim that there’s a woman to blame. And I know it’s my own damn fault.