Fiction | London | Mendocino | Alcohol
A Trip
Call it panic, alcohol induced, or a need to escape.
I was alone, wrapped in a bathrobe, sitting by the front room window. It is a sunny November morning. Josh Groban is faintly heard on the radio playing in the kitchen. The television is on across the room, muted— Joe Scarborough is miming endless opinion about the Israeli situation after being attacked by Hamas.
I sighed, inching toward the half-opened window to inhale the fresh air.
I’m trying to deal with something quite extraordinary.
What I need is a little more alcohol, and another dose of painkiller. I would not feel the same despair.
I’ve been on a diet for six weeks, losing a couple of pounds. I look no different.
Two hours later, I was heading down to the airport in San Francisco.
There’s no more depressing place than London in November. Later, it was the next day, around ten in the morning, I grabbed a cup of coffee at Starbucks. I ignored the bitterness on my taste buds, abandoning the urge for a sugar high.
I hopped on the tube, heading across the city. At Tower Bridge, I got off and came out of the station to join the crowd milling around the Thames Embankment and the famous historic walls of the tower.
I found a bench close to the water overlooking Tower Bridge and thought how this trip had come about, telling no one, not even my wife.
I sat there going over and over what had occurred. When I woke up, back home in Mendocino, there was a woman’s body on my bed next to me. I almost laughed aloud. What was a woman’s body doing on my bed?
I had a shower, came downstairs and sat in my bathrobe, convinced it was a dream. So convinced, I never went back upstairs.
I took a call from my wife. She was calling from Colorado. I told her everything was fine, thinking it really was, you know, an inch from truth.
I don’t know what possessed me to run away, to London of all places. I’ll spend the day in the city, and when I return to my hotel, I’ll call my wife.
I drank heavily on the flight over, till I was refused, then slept.
I dreamt I had made love to a stranger. I woke with mixed euphoria, exaggerated sadness, a result of too much alcohol. That said, I wished there had been a touch of love in the dream.
When I woke, the flight attendant brought me coffee. It was reality.
A slow smile stretched across my face.
“Thank you,” I said, and then fell back asleep.
Now, peering across at London Bridge, my mind repeating a million questions to which I have no answers.
Will my wife still love me? Will I say goodbye and never go back?
I just sit here, waiting, watching the draw bridge rise over the Thames, as the cold November rain starts falling, answering my own questions.
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