Today was Saturday. It was 3 p.m., and the little stage was home to 12 mad musicians playing guitars and fiddles in the weekly ritual known as the Acoustic Jam. A dozen guit-boxes and violins sang in the hands of local legends, and their fans drank beers in an effort to avert a hangover.

Sarah the bar tender (no relation to the other Sarahs) knows my order. Chicken fingers, fries and an IPA. A respectable order for a 24-year-old. A man in a beret sits beside me, tapping his feet to the music. His close-cropped hair once flowed long during his tour with the Grateful Dead.

A couple in their 50s argues about whether they have Bud Light in bottles. A man in a worn striped sweater dutifully fills out the daily crossword puzzle. At regular intevals, the patrons file out to smoke a cigarette — a habit they once enjoyed inside the bar, now illegal in the Capital of the South.

This is a caricature of Richmond and a photo-realistic portrait at the same time. Racism, homophobia and conservative politics are both enshrined and decried by the bar-born politicos. The local college basketball team, the VCU Rams, plays a losing game against Florida State on the tiny bar TV.

There’s talk of ordering shots. It’s Saturday after all.

Sarah brings me another beer, and the band of assembled musicians cues up another song. Without so much as a sheet of music, 12 men and women carve a song out of anticipation and skill. The crooning vocalist, hair wrapped in a bandanna, puts words to the magically coherent strumming.

There’s no cover charge here. At the door, you pay the price of stepping out of your time and into the time of the South. New comers are offered handshakes and hugs. For a culture that has been quick to hate, it’s strange to see that all are welcome here. Perhaps the Civil War could have been settled over a pitcher of Mimosas at Brunch.

As the clock strikes four, the bar grows louder and louder. The price of a beer drops to three dollars. Excited red-faced musicians pluck at silver strings. Conversations are drowned out, and the sun begins to set. It is almost time to leave.

I clutched a letter in my hand, addressed but unsent, and looked intently at it. The black ink on green paper snapped at me. Why didn’t you send me? Was it a lack of stamp?

“Goddamnit, you know why I didn’t send it,” I said. The letter stared back at me.

“So why do you keep me around?” the letter asked.

My hand twitched and I whistled a bar of a song. It was a song she had taught me. It was a shield of sorts, clearing my head of memories best not remembered. The unstamped letter glowed in the night. I had sealed it months ago and forgotten its contents — a birthday present for someone now lost.

“I don’t keep you, and I don’t lose you,” I said finally, deciding against tearing the envelope’s seal.

“We can’t keep meeting like this.” A voice called from the hallway. Sarah, her red hair swept behind her neck, stood naked in the threshold of my bedroom. And all about us the snow fell.

That night, after Sarah had gone to bed, I stood on the balcony of my old apartment. A wash of nostalgia flowed over me, and I whispered into the night:

“I don’t want the world. I just want your half.”

It was my birthday. Twenty-five is not a particularly large number. It doesn’t bring the gravity of 18 or 21. The things I could do the day before were not less than the things I could do that day. After a long drive, I was back in the South. John Fairbanks was still in New York City, drinking with the boys and girls of our past. But today wasn’t the past. It was the future.

Across the table sat my next door neighbor Emily and her best friend Sarah. Sarahs always find me. The bar roared with the sound of kids returned from real life to their childhood homes. It’s only in the darkness of December that one truly understands what our parents’ houses have become: restaurants that keep our childhoods alive. We go to our neighborhood bars and drink with the kids we grew up with to try to forget about the gym teachers and the art teachers with armpit hair.

I stopped going home a long time ago.

Sarah stared at me with piercing hazel eyes — with an intent for which I don’t think I could do justice. We’d said our good-byes months before — after a broken promise and a sad series of phone calls. She was the first girl since her to remind me that there was something more than just girls at bars and wild dreams. And she looked into me, and everything came back. My phone buzzed.

“We’re going home later. Happy birthday.”

There are few things in this world more confusing than sex. For those of us lucky enough to find a willing partner, it’s a wild mix of adrenalin, passion and pleasure. If we’re very lucky, there’s emotion attached. We can be glad in the interim, but at the end of the day, we can’t understand its full impact. A girl once asked me if I’d ever fucked a girl I loved. When I said “no,” she told me the most important thing I would ever learn: fucking is one thing; making love is another. I didn’t love Sarah.

As we tumbled in to bed later that night, I saw them all. The girl who married the guy she was meant for. The girl who wound up with cats in Seattle. The girl who had a kid. All of them. And even though they weren’t here that night — even though they weren’t her that night — I still loved them. I don’t let people go. We are not toasters. When the bread is done, we don’t pop off.

So I slept well that night, cradling the naked ex-girlfriend who had cheated on me on Columbus Day. Somewhere else in the world, 23 other girls slept soundly.

We are all alone. We roll around in the darkness, searching for someone else to hold on to. Hold on tight.

Strange winds blew through the streets of the capital. The hard leather heels of my shoes clicked on the concrete sidewalk, beating out a steady drum cadence. All around me the broken glass of relationships and beer bottles littered the ground.

It had been four years since Sarah left me, four years since I had anything close to a real relationship. It was strange to think that a four week fling in the fall of 2008 was the most meaningful adventure in Love that I’d had in as many years.

I tripped on a raised piece of sidewalk, stumbling a bit before regaining my composure.

“Careful,” Fairbanks said. “That’s a sidewalk.”

“Yeah, man. My hiking feet are losing their edge.”

Fairbanks, turned out in a green hoodie and paint-stained brown shorts, blew a few bars on his harmonica from Dylan’s “With God on Our Side.”

“So the wife’s up in New York this weekend? She make it okay on the subway?” I asked.

“Yeah, she just texted me that she’d ridden it ‘all by herself,’” Fairbanks replied. “I guess she met up with Annie when she got off of work.”

“Cassie in Manhattan. I gotta say, I would’ve never seen her doing that on her own.”

John laughed. “I think she’s got a lot more confidence than you give her credit for.”

“Don’t get me wrong, it’s just that last time she wound up in the Big Apple, she froze into an icicle and took a week to thaw out.”

We walked on toward the bar.

“So the two year anniversary is coming up soon,” I said as we rounded a corner. The wind was picking up now, pulling the dust off the street and into the air.

“Yep — It’s kind of scary, when you think about it. Big-life-decision scary.”

John and Cassie had met two years ago this weekend at a bar not far from where we were walking. What started off as a one night stand had become a serious endeavor into post-college, real-life, honest-to-God Love. It had its rocky moments, but at the end of the day, they were happy.

“Did I tell you about that gallery thing?” John asked. “My proposal got accepted, so now I’ve gotta get in touch with the other artists and get that stuff rolling.”

“Yeah, weren’t you aiming for an opening next spring?”

“Actually, I was thinking summer or fall, we’ve got to put together a bunch of portraits.”

Then it hit me — John was here to stay. And what the hell was I doing? I was fucking a college student once in a while, spending my days miles from home, and generally drinking myself to death.

“Shit, John,” I said. “That’s a long way off to make plans.”

“It’s not like I’m going anywhere. I’ve got Cassie, I’ve got a job, and hell, I guess I’m happy,” Fairbanks confirmed.

“Making plans for infinity,” I muttered.

“What?”

“I know it often looks like I’m just rolling with the punches, stumbling around in the darkness, and just generally living on Gilligan’s Island, but I’ve had a plan since this all started. It’s a plan for the rest of my life. I just haven’t been doing anything about it lately.”

We walked into the Trojan Horse, a dimly lit joint with a copper bar top. It was mostly empty, and the regulars lifted a glass to us as we found a table and ordered drinks.

“Woof. That’s whiskey,” I said, taking a sip of my bourbon on the rocks.

John took a sip from his PBR. “So why haven’t you done anything about it?”

“I think I forgot how.”

The bartender, a cute brunette girl with tattoos up and down her arms, unplugged the bar’s sound system from the radio, and plugged in her iPod. Ana Ng came on, and I was suddenly lost in a flood of memories.

“Dan, I think it might be time to remember,” John said.

“I think you might be right.”

Portraits bear an idyllic resemblance to their subjects.

Then, in the cloud of the evening, my eyes focused on something out of place. Once upon a time, in the depths of a particularly cold October, a girl had drawn me a comic. The punchline was this: “Hey Danny, you know that everything’s gonna look up, right? I mean, well, it always does, doesn’t it?”

That little scrap of paper, which survived the years, was tacked above my desk. It had been with me over nearly six years of moves and relocation.  We don’t choose what things are important to us. The people around us make, do, and say those things accidentally.

A truth and a lie scratched in .38 mm black ink on torn 20 pound paper followed me around like a prophetic ghost. It was drawn on a day that I would never forget by the only girl who ever saw me cry. I don’t think she knew that I still kept it.

The kids smoke cigarettes to look busy, occupied. It isn’t sadness. This is not Faulkner’s southern Gothic — nor is it a romantic scene. This is something different — a modern romantic syntheti-topia.

People here survive without watches, with a beer in hand, content to stay where they are.

I am becoming one of them. And it’s not so bad. I wipe the sweat off my brow and say, “Yes sah, it sure is a hotton’.”

I sleep with them, I drink with them — but my dreams, my dreams live elsewhere. They are in impossible places where the sunsets are long and sad and warm and fade into star-filled skies — a surreality filled with my sins and savings.

There are buttermilk consequences here with comfortable admonishments for the colorful, catastrophic life that I have led.

This is not Faulkner’s South. This is my South, where short memories and long nights contrast humanity and something greater and less than.

I am waiting, waiting for the sound of the sirens to arrive at my door. To draw me out of this warm coma will take a kind voice or a police boot to the back of the head.

I wore a green hat. I wrote words on toilet paper. And now, in the distance, the future is calling. If this whiskey-soaked diary is proof of nothing else, it’s time for a change.

Will Montserrat, clothed in the wrinkled vestments of the previous evening, joined me.

“How’re you feeling Dan?” Will asked while rubbing his forehead.

“You know me, Will — I can get piss-drunk on a boat in a storm, and still wake up ready for work,” I said, which was more or less the truth.

“So Sarah’s coming in today with Erik. Are you going to be alright?”

“Talk to me after I’ve had a bloody mary or two at brunch.”

“You can’t still be hung up on her after all these years,” Will said as he lit up a cigarillo. “Are you telling me that there hasn’t been anyone else since?”

“‘Course there has, Will. But I haven’t seen or talked to her since… the thing. My last memory of her was a sweaty encounter in a janitor’s closet after the banquet,” I said, knocking the ash from my spent cigarette.

I fished another out of the pack, and flicked my lighter. The Observer awards banquet, which had begun with Grace and ended in Sarah, was a fitting end to my college experience. With half of the paper’s staff retiring, the senior staff decided to get lit before the event. Dressed in a tuxedo, I rode to the banquet with my date for the evening. Grace was sufficiently amused by attire, and a little confused by the invitation.

“Will, what the hell happened that night?” I asked, mid-remembrance.

“The banquet? Heck, Prickle ate seven salads, you and Howard stood at the podium for nearly twenty minutes doing vaudeville, somebody stole the Observer banner, and Al lit a bale of hay on fire. I can’t imagine what the wait staff thought of the entire thing.”

What a mess. We were dressed to the nines, eating on the company dime, and drunk on nostalgia and malt liquor. After the dinner, we went back to the news room for a nip of whiskey. John Fairbanks, Prickle, Al Dunne, Remi, Howard, Molly, Will, Moira, Grace, Sarah and I sipped at plastic cups of the cheap stuff. And then the thing happened.

“Will, I think I’ll be okay. We survived college, I think I can survive seeing my ex-girlfriend,” I said. I hadn’t thought about that night in nearly two years.

I had asked to talk to Sarah alone.

“You once told me that I’d never get the Editor in Chief slot if I didn’t step up my game,” I’d said, almost in a dream. “You’re why I’m here today. You did this as much as me.”

I wasn’t around when Grace disappeared that night and met up with Christie. We saw them later at a house party, and I was a bit red-faced.

“Dan, we’re getting old,” said Will. “The older we get, the more ex-girlfriends we’re going to have. I think it might be time to start being happy for them and forgive them and ourselves for all the crap we’ve been through.”

The sun broke over the apartment building in front of us. Brooklyn was awake.

“Will, you’re right — and I think I’ve decided something,” I said.

“What’s that?”

Staring into the sun, I replied, “I’m moving to the city.”

The boy follows her with his eyes, but does not move. His eyes do not return to the crowd, but remain at stage right. The spotlight shifts in that direction. We find the girl at a table with two friends. The three sit in chairs, upright, and share a meal. The fourth chair lies upturned on the floor.

The boy, sensing rightness in his actions, runs toward the table. He bends down and, before touching the upturned chair, speaks:

BOY: Is this seat taken?

GIRL: All you had to do was ask.

The boy rights the chair and takes a seat. His back to the audience, the boy holds the girl’s hand. The filler lights fade to black. The spotlight remains on the four children at the table. The spotlight blinks out. The curtain falls.

The city loomed large as the China Bus rolled toward the Lincoln Tunnel. Sitting awkwardly in my cramped bus seat, I fingered my camera’s on switch nervously. Fairbanks and his girlfriend Cassidy McLeod sat a few seats away talking nonsense at each other.

We were on our way to a reunion of The Observer. Remi, Moira my old boss, Will Montserrat, and the rest would be there. I couldn’t wait to see the faces of the boys and girls who wrote words and made love at the magazine.

“Cassy, you see that?” I said, pointing to the skyline. “That there is the center of American culture — 9 million lost souls stumbling around in ecstasy and remorse. Drunk, stoned or sober, New York City is the beginning and the end of every great love story or murder mystery.”

Cass had never been above the Mason-Dixon line and shivered at the thought of a below-32 winter day. New York was as cold and strange a place for that southern girl as the moon was for the human race.

“I don’t see what’s so great about it,” Cass said. “I can see skyscrapers in Richmond. New York just seems like a bigger place to get lost in the fire.”

The bus entered the tunnel and drove on through to China Town. As we exited the oversized rickshaw, a blast of wind shot down the avenue and gave us a reminder of our winters at LOPI. I smiled.

We collected our bags and took the subway to Moira’s apartment in Park Slope. To this day, despite the year I lived in Brooklyn, I still can’t figure out the City’s mass transit system. Moira lived a few blocks away from the 7th ave stop, and we managed to brave the January chill — with Fairbanks acting as a windshield for his romantic confederate.

We knocked on the door and were greeted with the sort of welcome that only accompanies a long separation: glasses of whiskey and long hugs. We were back.

Gwen, who was the editor of The Observer when I first started, pulled me aside.

“So, Sarah’s coming tomorrow with her fiance,” she said with a half laugh. “Just thought you should know.”

Sarah Cardiff was engaged. I finished my whiskey in one large gulp. With a cough, I managed to say, “Awesome. I didn’t know she was affianced.”

“She didn’t tell you?” Gwen asked. “Woof, I didn’t mean to break the news to you that way.”

Somewhere inside of me, gears that I assumed had stopped whirling started up again and then broke. And it hurt. We are not toasters. Our elements don’t just turn off when the bread is scorched.

“Yeah, Erik left the seminary for her.”

“Good for them. Guess I shouldn’t be expecting a wedding invite.”

“For what it’s worth, I wish I had a chance at her.”

“Not helping, Gwen.”

And then we drank. Whiskey and wine went from bottles to cups to livers. And we were a family again. Happily drunk, we swapped war stories of life and love and heartache. Will was getting his medical degree, Gwen was programming business card websites, Moira was dating Remi, and we were all getting deliciously old with nothing to show for it.

The next morning, I woke up and found our fantastic little family sprawled on the floor in various states of undress. I took a piss and had a smoke. This was going to be a good weekend.

What was supposed to be a snowy day in late winter transformed on that hill-top. As the priest bore the urn into the mausoleum, the dark clouds of that cursed month parted. They all turned from the ceremony. My aunts, my uncles, my cousins, my sister, my parents — and lastly my grandfather  — watched as a grateful sun shone upon the gilded box that held the remains. Then the priest said his peace and we went our separate ways, all of us secure in the sense that Grandma was proud of us — if not for our accomplishments, but for our sins. My grandfather would go home to an empty house for the first time in over sixty years. He loved her. And that’s all that’s worth saying about it.

After a beer with my dad, I climbed in my car and headed for Brooklyn. I shed a few tears on the steering wheel, but it was a petty offering. I could only imagine the great-grandchildren she would never see and the wedding toasts she would never give. A woman of ninety, my grandmother had seen the depths of human sadness and the heights of human kindness. So as I drove down I-95, I cried. Not for the loss of a great soul in the world, but for the fact that I couldn’t share all of the happiness of my life with her. I could never again watch her face light up when I told her about the next best thing.

She would never see all the good she had wrought in the world.

—

[Events removed]

Grace and I stood outside a bar in Brooklyn. I had taken off my black suit and changed into something approaching normal. We lit up a cigarette.

“Remember when you didn’t drink and smoke?” she asked.

“Yeah, and I don’t think I was more or less happy,” I replied.

More to follow. Apologies for the hiatus, motherfuckers.