Material Pretense

In the moonlight, he’s a Hard Rock Hotel regular, a first-class business owner with a sagging tie and a foot, not broken but bent, tripping over gravity and muddy puddles of cranberry and vodka.

In the sunshine, every button is buttoned, every hair lies against his skull like the unscathed Persian silk sheets that adorn every abandoned queen sized bed in the rooms of his cold, Victorian mansion.

The moon peaks again and the silk turns to straw, the scent of Tom Ford vanilla is displaced by hot breath and lager, his esteem diluted by innate uncertainty.

His babies are buried, peacefully, soundly, under mounds of blankets on a Tempurpedic mattress. His love the same, unaware of the pale indent on his left ring finger, unaware of his unsteady stance, unaware of the straw and his half-empty heart.

From a Coffee Shop in Downtown San Diego

A beautiful girl, presumably my age, stands across the street underneath a neon sign that swings in the wind. She’s wearing red pumps, a black thong and a bra decorated with the innocence of fat polka dots.

Her smile is stunning, she’s laughing and smoke from her e-cigarette dances in pirouettes out of her pursed lips, painted red. It’s impossible to know, through the blinds on the dirty windows of a hotel coffee shop on the other side of the street, if the way her lips curl and her eyes light up is genuine. It’s hard to tell, from the judgement of a girl with a heightened sense of modesty and a distaste for occupying the center of attention, if she sleeps peacefully at night, if she feels love, if she feels loved, if she’s a heavy drinker or inherently sober.

Her sandy hair, reaching the middle of her rib cage, is swept over her left shoulder and as stunning as her olive skin and toned body.

She’s still smiling.

She enters and leaves and reenters and leaves the dark building behind her, to visit and work and return and visit and work. Some eyes that pass stare with animal-like desire, looking first at her angelic face, traveling swiftly to the sloping of her chest, the curvature of her hips and the definition of her calves.

Does it weigh her down? From behind the blinds on a dirty window at a hotel coffee shop across the street, the question eats me. Regardless of what happens inside that building, inside her home at night; I want to know: Is she content?

On a napkin, on a bench at the park

For a writer to feel inhibition for thinking alone in the corner of a suit-and-tie hotel bar, sipping a mimosa and writing cursive on an embellished napkin, is not to be a writer at all.

A writer cannot fear the eyes of the sober and clouded, the underaged and elderly. If they see and find us crazy, they’re probably right.

Yet, without a hint of psychosis, we are no longer writers. We are humans, sitting alone in the corner of a suit-and-tie hotel bar, creating beauty in our minds that we’re too afraid to reveal.

I’d rather be crazy.