This Is Fine

Thirty-five minutes early. He stared blankly at the pooling mess.

This is fine, he thought, except it wasn’t. The only image in his mind was that of himself engulfed in flames, slow-roasting on a spit over a cackling fire, the terrifying Renaissance painting-esque imagery underscored by a cacophony of excited snorts from little demon piggies that were, at present, dancing around the fire pit in anticipation of their supper, hellish glee abound as they bopped to and fro on their tiny hind hooves.

The nightmare circus in his brain was masked by his glazed over eyes fixated lifelessly on the liquid slithering toward the edge of the table like a serpent of directional chaos, toppling over the precipice into a blood-like cascade that splattered every which way off the stone floor upon impact.

Briefly, his troubling mental imagery was assuaged and he became concerned less with the embarrassment of the ordeal and more overtaken by fear for the pristine livelihood of his new sneakers, and their ability to hold their own against the kamikaze of red wine droplets gunning for the white canvas at random, the trajectories of which were entirely unpredictable; there was no safe spot to which he could shift his feet and be clear of the splash zone, lest he wanted to sweep his legs out from under him completely and fall into a sort of side plank on his chair, his legs extended straight out on the opposite side of the Merlot waterfall. He reasoned that, had the timing of his fumble been more opportune, this maneuver could have provided a natural occasion to casually and literally flex his abdominal strength in front of his date, but he was more far likely to kick out the knees of a passing waitress with the move and cause even more untold destruction than he would impress the entirely-out-of-his-league psychopharmacologist he met on one of those apps.

The dancing devil pigs or whatever was happening in his head were not out of the ordinary, not for him. Where a professional might refer to it as one thing, he referred to it as “The Darkness,” because he’d long since had a flair for the dramatic, and he loved nothing more than covering up his problems by employing various, unnecessarily theatrical tricks of misdirection to distract any onlookers from what was truly going on beneath the surface. Perhaps someone shamed him in his youth and this scarring engrained in him the subconscious belief that he ought not burden others with the true nature of his emotions, lest he wanted them to turn and make a bee-line in the opposite direction and never look back, the same way his father did to him after sitting him on a fake boulder with a speaker in it outside of Disneyland’s Matterhorn Bobsleds and instructing him to “Wait here, someone will probably come along for you eventually,” when he was far too young to conceptualize the notion of abandonment and youthfully held firm the childlike wonder and sanctity of trusting the people that tucked him into bed at night.

But issues of abandonment were not the reason his hands were shaking so much that he not only spilled but entirely dropped the twenty-one dollar glass of Merlot he’d ordered off the menu in a tizzy by simply picking the one with the most interesting-sounding name. He knew nothing about wine and probably wanted only to impress the waiter at this restaurant that was itself fancier than any home he’d lived in since birth.

No, the cause of his internet-diagnosable tremor was the entirely-out-of-his-league psychopharmacologist with whom this first date in this fancy restaurant was all about. He consulted an issue of GQ (he didn’t buy it, of course, just stood awkwardly in the magazine section of his Barnes and Noble while he snuck pictures on his phone of various models with his-idea-of-cool-looking outfits) then proceeded to find the next best thing at the mall down the road that had nowhere near the thousand-dollar-garments level of pieces from the magazine, rather, that had enough stores to piecemeal a knockoff ensemble that looked chic enough but cost him little more than the Ben Franklin he’d earned in total for his Tuesday round of dog walking in Rittenhouse.

How he’d managed to match with the entirely-out-of-his-league psychopharmacologist was beyond his knowing, and even beyond the expertise of his friends that were far more romantically inclined and adept in the world of online dating. He himself had so inexpertly dated prior to this point that, at the insistence of his friends, he finally downloaded one of those apps that had, up until the point of actually using them, only served as laughable social media fodder.

“Can I offer you another glass?”

It was the waiter from before, the one he inexplicably felt the need to impress by ordering what he’d later come to realize was actually the cheapest glass of wine on the menu, despite its cool name.

“Oh.”

That was it. Just, “oh.”

He looked down at his white sneakers. Why had he worn sneakers to this restaurant? This restaurant was way too nice for sneakers, and now he realized that the hostess definitely clocked that about him when he came in, and so another source of social embarrassment was added to the laundry list.

A lifetime passed before he mumbled, “I think I’ll hold off,” or something vaguely noncommittal of that nature.

He stared across the table and, for the first time in a while (uncharacteristic of someone as annoyingly punctual as him) looked at his watch. The thirty-five minutes had elapsed and, somehow, another forty had gone by. Another forty of dancing pigs waiting to eat him, another forty of tap-dancing in his seat in order to avoid Merlot bombs on his brand new posh-knock-off white sneakers, another forty of worrying about all the different people in the restaurant thinking, with every passing minute, how this trembling idiot had been sitting alone at a table set for two for seventy-five minutes.

She never showed.