rainy night house
Mission aborted. By that, I mean my trip to the bar. I'm a coward. I even left the house after studying just to walk by it and see what it's like. It's still there. It's even open tonight. I must have walked by three times or more, attempting to look non-chalant as I peered through the window over the glare of the opposite street's neon. It looks so... honest, so old and so classic. I want to go in more than anything. And tonight is a great, quiet rainy night with no plans. But.

But. It's empty. There's only the bartender, a lonely-looking mid-young-ish-aged woman sitting behind a tiny counter in the tiny wood-paneled room. The lighting is warm, soft and yellow. I can see bottles on bottles of liquers on the wall. This is not a beer bar, a club or an izakaya. It's a genuine hole-in-the-wall upscale bar.

I look, I see, and I imagine. The drinks are expensive but if the bartender knows you she might make them extra strong or even free. She likes to play jazz and look out on the street thinking about sepia times. She serves businessmen their gin and tonics and listens to their stories with one ear while waiting, waiting for someone else to come. Who does she wait for? I suppose she finds her work lonely and the business often slow. I suppose she'd like someone to talk to.

This bar is magic enough to have captured my imagination so much so that I have fantastic expectations of it. I'm developing this heartfelt fantasy of first talking clumsily with the woman behind the counter and then becoming her good friend and conversation partner. I suppose she might even be a neighbor and live in an apartment above the bar across from my window. I want to go find out.

But I'm afraid. I know how to say so little (although I embrace the chance of this experience because it combines tongue-loosening cocktails with conversation practice) and I have so little money (so nix that first part) yet I see myself in this bar making friends and laughing.

This is what I mean about "expecations" re the last post. I don't project expectations the way most people do. I fantasize. I fantasized myself a big house in the suburbs with a tatmi room and I didn't get it. At first, I was confused and sad but now I like my room, my house and my family. Now I'm fantasizing myself a 1920s bar scene with a hostess that for all I know could hate foreigners and kick me out onto the street.

I wonder what she thinks of me, walking by looking lost. To seem purposeful I went across the street to Lawson's drug and got some choco-strawberry bon-bons (in the name of trying SOMETHING new) and then walked around the block a few times more.

O woe is me! WOE!!! Why must I be such a coward? Why must I be such an idealist?!?? When will I work up the nerve? I have nine months. This winter. I will do it.