First Drink of an Evening

The first drink of an evening was often how he liked to imagine the progression of her against his mind...the slight anticipation, the comforting expectation...the first sweet moments that dulled the day, erased sharp edges and warmed him from the very first kiss of the glass against his lips. 

After a day of chores, the mundane...people, slightly annoying decisions...the taste of bureaucracy, and the lack of unmoving moments in a chair in an office...that first tumble of ice into crystal was compelling...a clarion call to hurry the mind and shift to a different place. 

And while that implies an addiction...well, I guess it just may be. 

But in a good way...a welcoming way, familiar.  Holding hands, a remembrance.  Quiet moments spent together with barely a noise.  These were the arc of thoughts as the arc of an arm brought a drink to his mouth and he savored the first bright tastes of the drink.

The drink was a toast to her...unspoken, silent but completely elaborative and deserving.  He simply toasted the way she made him feel...and that feeling was quietly and subtly the same way the first drink of an evening made him feel.

And the irony is that the second drink, as much as the first one made him feel that agonizingly glorious familiar way she made him feel...started to remind him that she wasn't there...and that the dulling soothing powers of the alcohol were patching up pieces of him that she had plucked from him and kept.  With the crushing weight of her distance slowly numbed by the distance between his drink and the next one.

Slowly, like watching the way an evening turns from its blue tones to grayish ones...and then you turn and it's black outside.  That first drink now a memory...but she remains blazing and on fire in front of him despite his very best efforts to let her slip coolly into the evening instead of burning that part of him that remained untouched by his best efforts to not let her linger in his mind.