The Long Road Home; pt. 3

He gazed at the room with bewilderment and yet a curious sense of wonder. He felt more whole in this shady dive than he had for years in his own home. Anonymity was something he strived for. He took a sip from his cold perspiring beer and took in the enchantedly lifeless scene. He saw her across the bar. He felt enthralled; she wasn’t conventionally beautiful, but nevertheless she exuded mysterious sensuality and her very presence felt seductive. He ordered two shots, one for liquid courage, and another for luck. They hit his empty stomach hard, the bile almost peaking to the surface, but only held down by the knots in his stomach, making him aware of emotions he’d long forgotten how to feel.
As he approached her he became aware of the wild pattering rhythm of his heart, giving life to a dead organ. This is life. As he stood beside her, he could not catch even the slightest hint of acknowledgement or emotion on her face, suggesting she too had been on the road as long as him, or she was just illustrating a carefully constructed persona. Her hair was long, down to her middle back, and jet black, darker than the room itself. Eyes of ice; crystal blue, penetrating and alarming, and lips so red and full he thought they surely could not exist.
“Im, uh…, can I buy you a drink?” he said.
“I already have one, you can clearly see that?”
She clearly was in disdain of the courting rituals as much as he, though she had gone on to abandon them all together, in favor of cold and distant relations that seemed so much real and human to the both of them. The modernist world does not require romance, in a cold and distant world the only rational behavior is to also remain cold and distant, unchangeable.
“What’s your name?”, he said, clearly aware of the futility and pointlessness of the question.
“It doesn’t matter what my name is, and I don’t want to know your name either,” she said, “Names do not have relevance in this dimension that we exist in, but I can see you’re attracted to me, so if you like, you can sit here and drink with me.”
“Ok, what are you drinkin?” he said.
“Dry gin”, she said, with her face resembling lady liberty, unchanging and stone.
They sat there and did not talk much, and when they did speak, they only spoke of the road. Their life previous to the road only held significance in that it eventually brought them to this long and never-ending cycle. Were they even human anymore? He dazed off and imagined the silliness of the word “human” being explicative of emotion and passion, as nearly every human he came across was a creature with no emotion or passion, just drifting through the days. St. Augustine thought purgatory was bad, but he clearly had never lived in the post-modern era.
“Many are freed from the prison of hell ... through the good works of the living and the Church's prayers for them, most of all through the unbloody sacrifice, which is offered on certain days for all the living and the dead.”
She looked bored, she gazed into him and evoked the chills he felt when he first saw someone dead.
“You’ve been good, we can go upstairs if you like.”