Can you describe the most beautiful person you've seen but never spoken to?

 

I light a cigarette and idly sip the water from my glass. When I am bored or nervous I tend to plow right through whatever beverage I might have on hand at the time. It is one of the reasons I can’t drink anymore. Doing this with water just cleans out my system and makes me have to piss a lot. Doing it with whiskey generally ends with my ass falling asleep in the back of a police cruiser, or an ambulance, or the neighbor's lawn.

I am bored because my friends are inside doing shots. I am nervous because one of these girls across the fire has the most beautiful eyes I can remember seeing in ever. Probably not ever, but the way they reflect the light of the fire, seeming to absorb it and intensify it all at the same time, hypnotizes me. I have a weakness for girls with pretty eyes, and these ones are far more than merely pretty. There is a bold shyness in the way I catch her taking little peeks at me. She never looks directly at me, but rather watches me out of the corner of her eye. The only thing I can’t be sure of is whether it is because she thinks I’m cute or a potential rapist.

I have a mean face, or so I am told. I am often told I look angry when the only thing that would be making me angry is the fact that I am constantly being told that I am, in fact, angry. Which in itself is a vicious cycle to fall into. I’m not sure what is happening now, exactly, but I desperately hope that isn’t it. I’m too old and too jaded to think anything real will come from any girl I might meet in a bar but there is still a small rebel force of my soul that hasn’t given up on the idea yet.

I am shockingly, painfully, desperately lonely. This is not a sentiment or an emotion I will ever share openly with anyone if I can help it. Lonely is a dirty word. Instead of letting the world know that you are human and long for genuine human connection, at least here, in this state, in this bar, whatever the case may be, it communicates that you are a pathetic creature not worthy of having friends. This is illogical. I have a trio of friends just inside those doors, about twenty feet past the stage and across the dance floor. There are at least a dozen people working in there right now that I would call my friend. Yet, if I were to admit I were lonely to any of them, it would only make me look weak.

I am lonely.

But I don’t say that. I don’t say anything. I quietly smoke my cigarette. My water is, for the moment, forgotten at my side. I glance at this beautiful creature, watching the shadows dance on the soft, haunting curves of her cheeks. I ponder what it would feel like to run my fingers through the gentle natural curls in her hair; what her wet lips would taste like against mine; her fingernails pressing into the back of my neck…

That is a dangerous train of thought to board. I disembark promptly, but still smile with my eyes when she looks my way.

There is an innocence and an honesty to this private flirtation that I have not felt in years that rests heavy on me like decades. There is a certain point where the typical ritual mating dance of man becomes intolerably boring. The first time, the first ten times, it is among the greatest and most exhilarating rushes you can ever feel. It rivals the sudden and inescapable thrill of jumping out of plane, of doing glorious battle with a ten foot wall of vengeful flame, of seeing the needle on your motorcycle tick over 140 where pebbles feel like boulders and you experience the physical manifestation of relativity as existence distorts around you.

This is the feeling of butterflies with razor blade wings fluttering around in your belly. This is life distilled to its very pure essence. It’s what you feel as a kid on Christmas morning, assuming your childhood didn’t suck. If it did, maybe it’s what you felt the first time you could afford to buy yourself something awesome, or the day your shitbag abusive parents finally got locked up for being negligent cum holes. Whatever it is that gets your rocks off personally. Some people have probably never felt it, but to you, I’m sorry. How can you describe sight to the blind? Music to the deaf? I am mighty but I cannot reach my atheist hand into the sky and drag God, kicking and screaming, out of divinity to show him to you.

Yet there is a point when you have done it too many times where that blind fire quits raging through your veins. Fifteen? Twenty? Thirty? I’m not sure. Eventually it becomes a meaningless pornographic parade in which the plot and the dialogue are every bit as ridiculous, monotonous, and boring as what you’d find in your average PornHub video. Welcome to the digital age, where you can stream every emotionless second of being a sexual supernova frame by frame in HD. Soon you’ll probably be able to download the exact chemical recipe to feel it, shot for shot, physically and emotionally. What a time to be alive.

The hubris of middle age is waning and exhausting.

There are only so many times you can grope in the dark to find some vague and unimportant shared interest. Oh, you also like this band that millions of people know and listen to regularly? Fascinating! You’ve got cats? Well that’s just swell. Aren’t animals really great? No, no, I don’t want to see pictures of them. I’m just so caught up looking at your (hideous fucking) eyes, I don’t want to miss a thing (please fucking kill me, you boring cunt) about this moment.

There is a pace to the entire affair. You can generally tell whether you’re going to get laid within the first ten minutes. The predictability is infuriating.

Yet here I am, waking demons better kept with chains cinched about their corpses in the dark recesses, flooded within the pools of alcohol that have yet to be washed from the furthest reaches of my inner caves. It’s not so much a conscious choice. It’s just happening. She looks bored, to be honest with you. As if she finds her friends as uninteresting as I do. Like she could speak and be worth listening to if only she was around someone who it wouldn’t be wasted on. Come waste my time, I’m thinking. Let’s pretend for a cigarette, for an hour, for a lifetime that we haven’t both done this too many times before. Let’s act like teenagers. Let’s not know better. Let’s watch this porn from the beginning, for the plot. Be my rich whore and I’ll be your pool boy, baby. Let’s talk about your cats.

This glass of water I’m drinking is the least satisfying thing I’ve ever consumed in my life but I am guzzling it like a hiker that has been lost alone in the desert for a week. Okay, maybe not quite that greedily, but I’m burning through it either way. I get up to go inside and take a leak but while I walk by this woman we lock eyes for a half second and get stuck there. I could sit here and describe her half smile, the little mole on her cheek, the way the fire shadows cast up from below gave her the faintest sense of being a demon that essentially made certain that I was as helpless in this moment as if she had been a literal succubus. I could tell you about the one stray bang that hung out of place. I could tell you about any of those things in great detail, but instead I’m going to tell you about how I keep walking and two minutes later have my dick in my hand.