About a quarter past one, for a moment there are only two of us left.

Behind her, someone in the next booth is laughing, yelling, laughing again. To my left, her right, every barstool is occupied, along with most of the space between them. Beyond the bar on stage two, one girl leaves down the narrow steps, another climbs them past her. A name is said, another song begins – Future’s Incredible. Behind me, someone screams, stops, says “oh”, and laughs loudly.

I light a cigarette. She notices and extends a hand over the knee-high table. I place it between her fingers and light another. She crosses her legs and sits back. The bartender looks over. She nods. A minute later, two more drinks arrive and I pay with cash.

She takes short drags, absently watching the performance on stage two.

Takes a drink.

Looks at me.

Breathes smoke.

Audibly bored yet barely audible, I read her lips:

“We’re friends, right?”

notes:

• Relayed last night, Wednesday.
• There was a smudge on the bottom left of the mirror, which I only noticed after a couple of hours. I’d passed out in front of it again Tuesday night and woke about an hour later to find that that I’d migrated across the floor towards it while I was out, again. When I opened my eyes, they were looking back at me. Maybe that distracted me from the remnant of the kiss I planted on the glass, though I don’t know how I didn’t see it for an entire day, and two fucking hours of looking.
• I  have spent a fair bit of time considering how a person might deliberately elicit a specific emotion from someone who has no conception of it whatsoever. For example, if there were an uncontacted tribe – in which all members were wired exactly like the rest of the species, and so were capable of exactly the same emotions – but within their world, perhaps due to their particular culture or beliefs, no one ever experiences happiness, nor do they have a word or symbol for it. The children never see the adults happy, and so by the time they reach adolescence, they no longer smile, even involuntarily. Maybe they just think of smiling as one of the odd things children do, and they don’t have a word for that either. If I were to somehow meet one of those people, a fully grown adult, and able to communicate with them perfectly, is there anything I could possibly say or do which would cause them to experience happiness? If I smiled at her, would she smile back? If she did, would it signify happiness? Would she simply be mirroring me? Would her smile just be a reaction to the absurdity of seeing me make that strange face that some kids make? Would she laugh without smiling? Could she laugh, feeling no happiness whatsoever? Could I make her understand what happiness is at all? It’s not a very good analog and the answer, of course, doesn’t matter; the question was enough to get me alone with her.