I stared into my glass of bourbon trying to see my future. A future, I hoped, was brighter than my past. A future that didn’t involve pain and heartache. A future that didn’t make me want to jump in front of the subway train every day. A future I wanted to live in.
Staring into my glass, I couldn’t see my future, all I could see was my past. A past I had spent the last few months trying to escape. Running from my mistakes, trying to forget my stupidity. The most important thing in my life walked out the door three months ago. Funny, I hadn’t realized how important she was before today. Before the 90 days before today. Before the day she left. If I had, then maybe I wouldn’t be alone in a bar, staring into a glass of bourbon, trying to find a reason to get up and go on with my life.
I suddenly realized that I had been sitting, motionless for a long time. The awkwardness of the moment struck me and I looked around the bar. It wasn’t that crowded and I was sure that most of the people had noticed that I had just been sitting there with a glazed look on my face. I didn’t know these people, so I wasn’t that worried about what they thought of the strange man, sitting at the end of the bar, staring into his glass. Besides, this was the kind of bar where people came to forget their past.
I looked up and caught my reflection in the mirror. My reflection looked back at me with a sad, disapproving look. He wasn’t sad because of what I had lost. He was sad because of what I had become. Sad because he was forced to watch me waste away in self pity. Sad because he knew I was drowning in my past. Sad because he knew that I still had a future full of surprises and happiness that I was refusing to see.
As he stared at me and I stared back at him, for the first time, I realized that my life was not behind me. My life was in front of me. I realized that my future was not tied to my past. And I knew that I wasn’t going to find my future in this glass of bourbon. My future was out there, outside this bar.
I pushed the glass of bourbon away and got up. Threw some money on the bar and walked toward the front door. As I approached the end of the bar, I glanced into to the mirror. My reflection was smiling. The kind of satisfied smile you get when you know a friend has turned a corner. Knowing that, in that moment, their life has forever changed. Nodding my head, I smiled back.
