Page 23 of Glass Half Full
She sounds like she wants to go on, but she stops herself.
“Thanks.”
I let the words sink in. I thought she didn’t want to acknowledge how we met. The way she tensed up in the office the other day told me the subject was off the table, and I haven’t brought it up since. I wasn’t planning to ever bring it up again. If she wanted to forget about everything and start over as strangers, I was willing to follow her lead.
It was probably the smarter choice, anyway.
Only she’s just admitted she hasn’t forgotten. The way we laughed tonight, the way she’s always got a comeback for me, the way just a sentence from her can turn my whole perspective on its head—it’s all a reminder of those days at the library workshops, of the nights I’d see her at slams, the times I’d watch her get on a stage and let her words pour out in a river that could swallow the whole world up in a flood.
I didn’t think of her like this—there was no heat, no bristling awareness of her body—but I didseeher. I saw that she was special. I saw that she was rare.
I see all that and more now. I want to go deeper than the surface. I want more than the sassy comebacks and sarcastic jokes. I want to get to know her, to get more than a glimpse of the fractured and fascinating person underneath. I want to know the good stuff, the bad stuff, what she’s ashamed of, what keeps her up at night. I have the outline, and I want to colour her in.
“It’s too bad,” I joke, doing my best to steer us back to safer waters, “that this job takes more than people liking me.”
“Maybe you have the wrong job.”
I stop moving so fast someone bumps into me, swears, and swerves to other side of the sidewalk. I stay where I am. Renee is already a few metres ahead when she realizes I’m not beside her.
No one has ever told me that before.
The few people I’ve let in on the fact that things aren’t going so hot at Taverne Toulouse—namely Monroe, Zach, and a couple of my friends from the poetry scene—have all tried to reassure me with the same affirmations: “It’s just an adjustment period,” “You’ll get the hang of it soon,” “Have a little faith in yourself.” No one has asked me to consider the fact that maybe this isn’t what I’m supposed to be doing.
Is it?
“You okay?” Renee backtracks to where I’m standing and stares up at me. “You look like you just got a huge splinter in your foot or something.”
I stamp my feet on the pavement. “Splinter free, I think. Let’s keep moving.”
I catch her glancing at my face a few times, like she can hear just how hard the gears are turning in my head.
“I’ve been at Taverne Toulouse for over three years,” I find myself explaining. “It got me out of that construction job I had with my cousin’s company. You remember the poem I wrote about that?”
She answers with a grimace that tells me she remembers exactly how much I loathed that job.
“I thought I was going to work there until I died or my back broke. Not that it isn’t a job worth respecting, but...it wasn’t where I wanted to be.”
Her eyebrows wrinkle. It’s cute—far too cute. “So why did you stay so long?”
This is the part of the story I always come back to, the part I rarely ever share.
“I...I don’t really know,” I lie. “All I know is that it was slowly draining everything worth saving out of me. If I hadn’t had poetry...I don’t even know.”
I can still hear the rattle of machinery around me, hear the patter of rain on my hardhat as I wore my hands down into calloused lumps digging hole after hole in the ground. That’s about all I was qualified to do. All the guys knew why my cousin gave me the job, why it took a family connection for me to evengeta job, and they weren’t quiet about it.
Hey, drug lord.
That’s how they’d greet me on site.
“It was a pretty dark time, but poetry...It’s like the one place where I can always feel like me, you know? It always makes sense.”
Renee nods, eyes fixed on the pavement.
“One night after a slam, a bunch of us ended up at Taverne Toulouse. It was still a student bar back then—a really trashy one too, but even then...Well, you’ve been there. Somehow, you walk in, and everything is...”
“Okay,” Renee finishes for me. “At least, that’s how I feel when I’m there. I feel like, maybe just for a little bit, everything is okay.”
“That’s it,” I agree. “That’s exactly it. It’s not like everything is amazing and all your problems instantly go away, but you feel more like you can handle them, like they’ve got less of a hold on you. At least, that’s usually how I feel...”
