One Hundred and Nineteen Seconds

The bar is too quiet for a Tuesday.

The wood of the table is scarred,

a map of lives passed through here,

leaving rings of moisture and half-forgotten ghost stories.

I ordered a Guinness,

the thick, dark head settling slowly,

a miniature storm in a glass,

gravity working its patient, obsidian magic.

It looks like the sky over the coast back home,

before the rain turns everything to iron and salt.

They say it takes one hundred and nineteen seconds to pour perfectly,

a precise science for a chaotic world.

I watch the bubbles fight their way upward,

a frantic, vertical pilgrimage

against the heavy, settling velvet.

I am waiting for a door to swing open,

for your laughter to cut through the stale air

like a blade through smoke.

But the seat opposite stays empty,

a wooden monument to absence.

The stout sits heavy, cold against my palm.

I drink to the space you don't occupy,

to the conversations we didn't finish,

to the way the light catches the foam

and reminds me that even the most perfect things

eventually go flat.

There is a comfort in the bitterness,

the way it coats the throat,

a small, manageable grief

in a glass that is slowly, inevitably,

finding its bottom.

I look at the clock.

Another minute gone.

The pub is still quiet.

The glass is still full enough to pretend,

and I am still here,

tracing the condensation,

learning the shape of loneliness

one slow sip at a time.