DEEP IN A DREAM

I dim all the lights and I sink in my chair.
The smoke from my cigarette climbs through the air.
The walls of my room fade away in the blue,
And I'm deep in a dream of you.

It was quiet in the city. Jack thought everyone must have left to go to the country for their holidays. Sometimes it felt as if he was the last person left in Philadelphia. Even when he walked amongst his shadowy fellow citizens on the streets, he thought he might be the only human being existing for real right now.

Everyone else seemed to him like zombies on auto-pilot.

There was a kind of societal division in the city in holiday season between those who could vacation and those who couldn't. Jack was a couldn't kind of guy ever since he quit his job at the advertising company he had worked for over ten years.

Now he was writing articles on stock tips for a small city paper and only just keeping his head above water. Mind you, it didn't help that he spent what little money he had left over after bills and rent for whiskey and smokes. Yes, he had finally become that hard boiled Raymond Chandler cliche he always wanted to be and he wouldn't have it any other way.

When you lose one life, you start another. Jack's old life had gone up in smoke with all of its promise of domestic bliss and long term security. Now he was only one pay cheque away from being homeless with the rest of the down and outs with checker board teeth who lived in the doorways outside his apartment building.

"Keep a box reserved for me boys and girls, I might be joining you," he would often joke with them. Maybe they didn't believe that with his one impressive secondhand suit he looked like he could fall into poverty so quickly but then again, they didn't know how far he had already fallen.

It was kind of impressive how quick Jack Taylor's descent had been from the upper echelons of society, like a grand piano falling down a lift shaft.

He still felt he hadn't quite reached the bottom, or at least that was how it seemed.

In his small apartment, he at least had a half decent view of the city. Late at night he would gaze at the twinkling lights and feel some sort of hope that he might just get his life together once again. Why not? He'd done it before.

He had been accused by his ex-partner of exhausting the comeback kid routine time and time again, but there was still some steely resolve inside of him that felt he could do it.  

Maybe it was delusion.

Pulling the curtains across his apartment windows was when the melancholy of what he'd lost really came to the fore of his mind.

Watching the candlelight flicker against the dirty wall of his room, he drank his way through a bottle of whiskey as he thought about the woman he loved so deeply and how far apart their lives had become.

She was married now to someone else and no doubt a kid was on the way. What had she chosen as a riposte to her life with him? Someone consistent, dependable, a sure thing. He could be those things if he really wanted to but he didn't want to become a bore. What could be worse than being a bore? But had he sacrificed his love just to remain interesting? And now he was permanently heartbroken, who was to say he hadn't become a bore now, too.  

She had moved on and he had stayed exactly where he was the day she left him. And rather than move on himself he had paused his life just like that grand old lady in that Dickens story he once saw on television.

Nevertheless, he was adamant he wasn't a zombie. Those deep feelings that flowed through him like a river were not the feelings of someone who was devoid of life. It just appeared that way perhaps.

As he watched the smoke from his cigarette create wispy turrets, he could almost half imagine her image, like a vision in front of him.

Was she trying to communicate with him telepathically? He sure hoped so. Did she want him to turn up like a valiant knight outside her old man's place and win her back like they did in the days of old?

Nah, those days were long gone. These were the times of once love is sailed, you do nothing and accept your fate. He didn't accept his fate but he avoided dealing with any practical solutions to resolving it by drinking his way to oblivion.

Most evenings he determinedly tried to find that sweet spot between epiphany, drunkeness and waking so he could determine his next course of action to win back his one true love.

But more typically he fell asleep, deep in a dream of her.