CHINESE CAFE/UNCHAINED MELODY

In that moment between finishing a drink and ordering your next one it occurred to Alison that it might just be a perfect metaphor for that sugar rimmed line between life and death. And if each drink represented a single lifetime to her then she'd lived at least a hundred since the start of the new year.

Besides all her friends were dying, one by one. She was dying too. There comes a point in a human life when you just feel the axis shift from immortality to mortality like one of those tilting labyrinth games with the metal ball you played as a kid.

Remembering something her guru once told her that marriage was an act of submission by both vested parties, she now found she felt this way about death. If you didn't submit then you resisted and in that space you discover that's where devils dwell.

She'd even been working on a poem entitled "Death Sleep Keep Calling Me" ever since the premature death of her son, Jonah, five years ago but had left it deliberately incomplete for fear of letting go of something deep inside her. Alison had read somewhere in one of her many books on the composer Mahler that he was afraid of finishing his ninth symphony as it would somehow symbolise the end of his life since it was often historically the case that composers would die soon after completing their ninth. Alison wasn't afraid of dying anymore, though. She was more than cool with the idea and didn't care who thought she was being affectedly laissez-faire about it. Completing something that signified part of her saying goodbye to her boy, though. That was hard.

Since the accident there had been something morbidly fascinating watching publishers, friends and family fall away like the abscission of leaves from an ageing tree over the ensuing years, increasingly keeping their distance as Alison's grief became evermore metastasised into an immovable object that they could find no way through or round.

In fact, the only minor change that had occured for her personally since everything had been frozen in time five years ago was the set of AirPods she'd been gifted by her sister, Vicki, for Christmas. To the amazement of her younger sibling, Alison had never listened to anything on headphones in her entire life, stubbornly preferring to protect her delicate ears from any intrusive accessories and proudly defying modernity with her aesthetic Zen sensibility. She was very much from the John Cage school when it came to silence, understanding there really was no such thing and keeping her ear to the ground for inspiration in other people's lives, much like a newshound. That was a poet's duty. However, the more internalised she'd become, the more open minded she was to tuning out of the world with the opium of music and taking refuge in the inner sanctum of her mind. Having a soundtrack for her thoughts while she sat at her favourite bar in town, made her feel as if she was starring in her own movie as some sort of 70 something femme fatale. It also meant she didn't need to engage in any useless chit chat with boozy barflys and could meditate on her ultimate obsession without any interruption outside of a gesture to the young bartender, Tom, when she needed her glass refilled.

It was a Friday evening at 'Carmichaels' and if she'd been self-conscious in any way, she would have recognised it was her home time as the youths appeared in their mating outfits to enjoy the night ahead, but she was oblivious and nihilistic so went ahead drinking and thinking in her own unabashed way. Watching the hive of activity in the bar-length mirror opposite her, she observed the younger people cavorting, flirting and acting as if death wasn't a thing and tried to imagine them all at the age she was now, and even further beyond as skeletons. She wasn't being cruel about their innocence, she was being compassionate. Everyone was hurtling toward the same destination at varying levels of denial. Jonah's death had stopped her denying the oncoming storm any longer and now she was making peace with it so she didn't need to pretend that she could avoid it.

Listening to Joni Mitchell on her AirPods, she found the pathos of 'Chinese Cafe/Unchained Melody' almost unbearable as she looked upon these pretty girls and boys untarnished by the pain of loss and grief. She felt a boundless love for them all and if she'd been a little more drunk would have offered to buy all of them a drink.

Closing her eyes, she could see herself back then in her 20's, addicted to the idea of being adored and falling deeply in love with someone forever.

Down at the Chinese Cafe
We'd be dreaming on our dimes
We'd be playing "Oh my love, my darling
I've hungered for your touch
A long, lonely time"

Forever was the most pernicious lie she'd now come to realise and when you finally figure out that 'nothing lasts for long' as the song said, you become free from the prison of believing in the permanence of things, like marriage and human lives.

Only art seemed to have the best chance at living beyond most things when it was done right. When it cut deep like the song she was playing right now.

How many drinks would it take to finish the poem, she wondered. At least another three. Maybe more. Probably a lot more. She may have dismissed the notion of forever but she still believed she had some time left. Maybe that was a delusion on her behalf, on all our behalfs, but that part of her didn't care anymore.

She caught the eye of Tom, the handsome bartender as he attended to her empty glass. The young man's resemblance to her late son was uncanny and as long as he kept working here, she would keep drinking and the damn poem would just have to take as long as it would take.

And time goes by so slowly
And time can do so much
Are you still mine?
I need your love
I need your love
God speed your love to me