Of Fish and Bourbon.

There is a bleak piece of furniture in the only room I can stay the night in these days, which I fail to recognize what it is called. It has four drawers and two compartments where I put all my stuff and I don’t order any of them. Ordered stuff get on my nerves, I mess up my clothes whenever I find them tidy to tell you the truth. If I get into a girl friend’s house and find her clothes ordered according to colour and her shoes according to heels, I secretly declare she’s not a friend anymore. There are a lot of items on that piece of furniture, that I don’t recognize what they’re called, ranging from stuff that I use daily like slim perfume containers and black-framed eyeglasses all the way to shoe boxes that have items inside their hollow stomachs, that I never use. I know you’ve noticed how I’ve remembered the perfume and the glasses, but I like to pretend I forget things. It is a newly acquired habit, for when I actually forget things; I can always blame it on my fish memory. For example, I can save the guilt trips I am forcibly injecting into myself today for forgetting the card I was given by the most important salt-n-pepper haired man in a multinational corporate, on my fish memory that I convince myself I have… but that’s another story.

There is a bleak piece of furniture in my room and the only reason it exists is for a half empty bottle of JnB to sit on.

I get home and that’s all I can stare at.

I travel the distance between my bed and the piece of furniture. I raise a shot. I raise a second. Now I can get back to bed harmlessly and safely. I can get back and convince my body to sleep and beg my mind not to think of today. I don’t want to think of today nor any other day. There are things I have to forget like how I know things are getting from bad to worse, from expected failure to utter failure, from temporary safe to permanent hollow and from phases of vulnerable to classic modeling of lonely.

Years down the line, I might not have a room which I know I shall stay the night in nor the cash to afford proper bourbon. However, I wish I can still depend on bleak pieces of furniture having a cheap bourbon bottle on top and my earned fish memory.