The Noble Experiment, San Diego’s East Village. 2:47 am, September 11th, 2015

A man sits in a corner booth where, other than his initial order, “Dealer’s Choice”, he has not spoken a word since arriving at 9:00 pm. Whatever the choice was that the waitress brought him — and has continued to deliver to his table each time his current glass neared empty — has been his only company for hours. Always a quiet man, yes, but never had he spent an entire evening alone with his thoughts and been too…what was the word; embarrassed? depressed? unsure?…to speak, even in a brief whisper, to himself.

His waitress has been watching him all night. One might think that such a clearly powerful man — the epitome of tall, dark (maybe not so much, but definitely in this light), and handsome — who had spoken but two words in five hours would garner more of her attention but the reality was that some men simply wanted to be left alone. And when they wanted to be left alone, she left them alone. But this man saddened the waitress for, each time she had approached the table — fresh drink and fresh napkin on the left; retrieve the empty and wipe to the right — she could tell he longed. He was not a brute. He did not want to be left alone. He simply was alone. Inside. And not only was he alone, her stomach dropped, he was the alone in knowing his pain.

The man was capping off an evening of drinking and getting lost in his own thoughts. He wished he could escape reality in the shadows and the booze but his seat had the unfortunate position of being next to an uninsulated section of wall that left him the only patron exposed to intermittent lyrical samplings from the karaoke night of the next door establishment.

…Hold on to that feel-ah-hee-a-a-ang. Streetlights, pee-pole-oh-ooh-oooh……

He reached into his blazer pocket (the left side, always close to his heart) and retrieved a worn photograph. The darkness of the room mattered little as the image was almost completely desaturated after four years with him. With him at meetings. At the combine. On graduation day. Draft night. Through practices. Through games. Most of all, through so many days alone staring out at the deep blue waters of the Pacific Ocean — she used to simply call it, The Blue — with nothing but his memories, his imagination, and a bottle of okolehao. It had been nearly three years since he swore that he had rid himself of all photos and symbols of her and was moving on. It was a boldface lie. But he knew they wouldn’t understand. No one could understand. This was his experience. This was his life. This was his love.

She was his love.

He drank.

He ran his fingers over the creases and folds of the print. He had looked at the image thousands of times before. He could see her in his mind’s eye at any moment — though, he had lately tried to convince himself, he visualized the woman in the photograph less and less often. Tonight, it would be, that the photo was simply held as a totem. The folds and scratches reminding him that he was in his reality — and she was not, had not, and never would be in his life again.

He set the photo on the table and swirled the highball glass by lightly whipping the three fingers that braced the rim. As the ice skimmed silently along the wall of the half-full cocktail, reflections of the candlelight blinked across the glossy image. Her dark hair. Her dark eyes. Her perfect skin. Her smile.

Oh her smile…

His body tensed. He recognized this because his right foot cramped — the lingering effects of a mostly-successful fracture surgery during his first NFL season. His wrist teetered and a cube of ice crashed against the side of the glass. A sharp clinking sound that, to his drunk ears (and love-drunk heart) felt deafening.

His eyes peered up. No one else had even noticed.

“Three years.” He caught himself. A barely audible mumbling after hours of choking on his monologue. “Three years today. Three GOD DAMN years ago today.”

Still, no one paid him any attention. His voice carried barely across the table. He knew the lady in the photograph could not hear him but, still, he put his head down and closed his eyes as he continued.

“I loved. And….I still love. I’m not going to deny it anymore.”

He paused. This declaration….did he mean it? Or was he drunk (Yes, definitely — had been since his arrival, in fact.)? Or was he still feeling the affects of having his bell rung at practice (also yes, but he’d had more concussions than hangovers in his day.)?

“I’m not going to apologize for giving love. For truly loving. For knowing what it means to give yourself to another. I mean….is that not the pinnacle of the human experience?”

There was no response. There would be no response.

“And, of course, I wish things had worked out differently. I wish every day that you were still in my life. That all those things we had stayed up late nights talking about on the phone: sharing a home, growing a family…simply being together because we were in love.”

He drank. He became angry.

“If I were king, we would be.”

He drank again. His anger subsided.

“I love you. I shouldn’t. Not because it’s wrong to love someone who will never love you back. Not because I shouldn’t love someone who caused me such pain. I’m mature enough to know what happened — and also to know how I feel. I still love. I am still in love.”

He peered up again. He was pouring out his heart — his soul. No one cared.

“But I can’t continue this. It’s eating me inside. Look at me. This is not the life you would have wished for me. The regret. The insecurity. The hopelessness.”

He felt sick but, still, threw back the rest of his drink. The ice clinked as he set the glass on the table. This time, however, he was ambivalent to the notice of others. He closed his eyes and rested his head against the wall. He did not envision her, only the waves of the Pacific.

“I promised I would honor you through the way I play. I have done that and I always will. I love you. And I’m sorry….But it is time for me to move on.”

He sat in silence for….how long? Maybe a minute. Maybe more. Maybe less. Finally, the voice of a singing woman came clearly through the wall.

No matter where you are,
A little piece of my heart,
Will be forever with you,
In the blue.

He did not bother to open his eyes when he heard the waitress clear his glass and wipe the table. But he eased his head away from the wall when, instead, of hearing her set down his single Dealer’s Choice, he caught the sound of two small glasses landing on the table before being filled on the spot.

“This one’s on me.” The waitress offered, pouring a clear spirit into each glass.

The man opened his eyes as the first scent of the drink’s indeterminate tropical flavor (he always picked up the slightest hint of banana). He looked at the waitress who was taking a seat and sliding one of the glasses in front of him.

“I’m Lin Sue. May I join you?”

He was taken back. She was gorgeous and he was….confused. “Hey. Umm…so how much longer are they doing karaoke over there?”

“Oh they were done a half hour ago. I just saw the DJ leaving, in fact.” She held up her glass and smiled at him, “Huli pau.”

He stared, nowhere in particular, for a moment.

“Huli pau.” He managed his first smile of the night and drank, never noticing that the photo was gone.

{fin}