Sad Songs

Someone sent me the email that follows.  Why?  Do I inspire this?  Perhaps I shouldn't recommend sad songs so often.  It is just that I love those sweet desultory things.


"Nights when you hurt so bad, you just want to be held. . . .  It's been so long.  You haven't kept count.  On purpose.  A Friday night.  Another dinner alone.  You know where you can go to eat and not feel so bad or be embarrassed.  Sushi, of course.  You choose the little fish restaurant that started so well and has fallen to hell.  Even there, the couples come holding hands, kissing at the car.  You can see it all.  You sit outside.  You are a freak, you think, an oddly shaped dog on the horizon, something outside the pack.  The moon is almost full.  The sun down, there is just the smell of moisture on the quickly cooling air.  Everyone gets served.  But you.  Finally, aching with humility, you tell the waitress you think they've lost your order.  Minutes later a lukewarm dinner comes out.  If you felt better, you'd ask for your money back, but you do not feel better.  You do not feel good at all.  For a minute, you are consumed by something outside yourself, another couple's conversation, an old Beach Boys song.  When you become aware of yourself again, it is terrible.  You are a moron, you know, feeling the emotions of others.  Empathy, you tell yourself, but you know it is fantasy. You shovel in the desultory meal trying not to chew too much so as not to feel the awful texture of the lukewarm fish.  This is what you get, you think.  This is what everything you've ever done has brought you to.  It's not all my fault, you tell yourself.  I was born wrong.  If I'd been born better, things would have been different.  Remember all the times you were struck by lightening, you say almost aloud, the way you sing along with a familiar song in a crowd.  What was that?  You try to think of something else.  You think about the article you read that morning, the one about the discovery of the first planet beyond our galaxy, beyond the Milky Way. The sun was interesting, they reported, full of metals.  It had already exploded, had already expanded and burned up the planets, but not this one.  It was like Jupiter, and somehow it survived.  How do they know this, you wonder?  Then you are by yourself again, the kind of person who eats alone and thinks about scientific articles in the New York Times.  There are worse things, you tell yourself.  Lots.  You look around at all the couples, some leaning together over dinners that are probably warm, others together so long they hardly speak.  You begin to feel your deficiencies.  There are bars, but they are not for you.  You think about churches.  You've never been able to stand them, but now you think of them and their socials, and you begin to understand.  Safety.  They were safe harbor.  People could go to a church dance on a Friday night and not need to be afraid.  No fights would break out.  Nobody would get killed.  It was a gentle, sweet time.  Finally, after so many, many years, you begin to understand.  Hello brother Leroy, they would say, how are you on this fine Friday evening.  Fine, you would say, and nobody would mock you.  Perhaps there would be a fish fry, the fish hot and just out of the oil.  Some corn.  A piece of cornbread.  At another table they might be carving pig.

The lukewarm meal is finished, you realize, sitting, looking, thinking.  I've done a lot.  I've done more than most, you think, sitting without purpose, without direction, without. . . . Perhaps tomorrow I will get a facial, you think, and after that an hour and a half massage.  Yes, I will.  I deserve that, you think.  But I'd better get home and drink some whiskey now.  That fish wasn't cooked well.  Whiskey.  That will fix you up."