Normal Force

I order a Long Island Iced Tea because I want to get drunk, but I’ve never been tough enough to handle shots. The bartender slides the drink towards me, his eyes hinting he knows what this drink means—I’m here to forget something, but I’m too scared of anything neat. I wonder if he’d help me forget, though he’s a man and a man is who I’m trying to forget. My ex left because he said he couldn’t get past me being the only woman he’d fuck for the rest of his life, and his life was going to be too long, so he had to “speak his truth,” which basically meant he dumped me, erased me from his life.
 
The bartender watches me sip my drink as he dries wine glasses with a linen towel by the sink. He seems worried or maybe that is me projecting because I’m worried about me. Worried about what will happen if I keep drinking these teas that taste nothing like iced tea. Alas, and I say this as someone who never says alas, nothing is happening. He walks over and raises his eyebrows when he hears ice clinking in the bottom of my glass. I nod my head. He adds a cherry to the side of the rim of my next drink, which I plop in my mouth and pull out the stem. I relish the splitting open, sweet and syrupy, the way it removes the bitterness, if only for just a moment.
 
I ask the man sitting next to me, “Have you forgotten me already?” and he stares at me for a second before he moves to a seat further away. He senses I’m imploding and doesn’t want to be near when that happens. I can appreciate that. My ex always said I had a gravity that pulled everyone in. I thought it was a compliment until he said it wasn’t one, that everyone crashed into me, exploding and dying because there was no oxygen for them when I was there. I had asked how could they explode if there was no oxygen, which is when he had rolled his eyes and said he had work to do. He turned his back to me at his desk and I stood there, nothing being pulled to me, not even him in his wheeled office chair, and I knew he lied. It wasn’t me; it was him. He had pulled me to him, and I was exploding. I went into the bedroom and lay on the bed, shut my eyes, and tried to will everything or anything to come to me, but nothing happened.
 
I curl my finger at the bartender. The invisible space between us thickens as he leans over to ask me if I’m okay. I ask him if he’d crash into me, just this once, please. He pats my hand as if I’m his grandmother or a small child. A sad smile slips across his face, and he tells me he can’t do that, there are rules. I tell him in space there are no rules and he says we aren’t in space and I laugh because of course we are in space, everything is space, we are space, there’s more space in us than there anything else, between our cells, within our cells, between me and him, everywhere is space, and he looks at me and tells me the space between us is too much, that he can tell I wouldn’t give him his, and I tell him none of us own space, I can’t take or give him space because it isn’t mine to give but he’s backing away, shaking his head, when I realize that I’ve pushed him away because I’m not gravity, I’m some kind of anti-gravity, I’m what keeps things away. I am space.