He continued to wander through the crowds, which had already thinned considerably from the peak season of the summer. He looked back at the city behind him and took in the giant skyscrapers in the sky All those lives and all of those people moving bustling with life’s little errands. Winter was coming, John thought to himself. Both seasonally as well as emotionally.
He snaked his way back to the Beer Garden and ordered a drink, and then another, and then another. He found a seat next to the water and looked out at an angry looking Lake Michigan. It was a windy day and the waves were unusually large for this time of year. As John looked down on the water, it suddenly crossed his mind that he should just jump in. Why not?
These thoughts passed for the moment, but John thought a little more about the question. Camus had talked about how suicide was life’s most important philosophical question. If life is full of suffering and misery, why do we stick around here? John had always thought the answer to the question was that we made relationships along the way that made the journey at the least bearable, and at the most even joyful. This was a fine answer until the people you were sharing the journey with were gone. Then what do you do?
He had a couple of more beers and began the walk back, thinking of he did as the people that counted on him as a psychologist, and how they might feel if he was gone, especially at his own hand. One thing he knew, was that it was very hard to estimate your worth to others when you were unable to see this worth in yourself. He knew he was at least a competent therapist, and that people had benefited from his experience, but for right now he felt like he was a man without a heart, and he couldn’t see what good such a man would be to anybody.
As he walked he couldn’t think about much else besides having another drink. He decided he wasn’t ready to leave this mortal coil, but also not ready to be alone with his thoughts either. He wandered though Lincoln Park and found a nondescript bar with the “Old Style” sign on the door and went inside. He wanted to disappear for a while, and Chicago had many such spots for just this kind of thing.
After ordering a Makers Mark neat, he wandered back to the old-fashioned jukebox and put a five inside. He had always had a playlist for the most melancholy moments of his life, and now he flipped through until he found Bob Seger, and in particular the song “still the same.” It had always conjured up a strong set of feelings, and now as he listened to it he thought about the song and its possible relevance to his own life. Here he sat in a dingy bar surrounded by strangers he didn’t know drowning his sorrows. After all these years. Still the same.
He followed that selection with “turn the page” and “against the wind” and settled into a familiar feeling of sadness and content. He had operated at this altitude for many years before he had met Stephanie and Kim, and somehow the familiarity of this feeling was oddly soothing to him.
After a while he simply lost all sense of time and place. Chicago has many such places inside its depths. Places that are dark and unassuming, and where a man can wander inside and away from his life into an entirely different kind of world. John was surprised to find that it was dark when he finally did stagger outside, and he decided that it was probably not a good idea to continue to walk in the condition that he was in. However small it was, the survival instinct still was faintly alive inside of him.
On the long cab ride home down the lake, he was again filled with the sense of dread about the things he had to do over the next couple of days. He someway and somehow had to think of some words to describe the things he had lost, and put them into some kind of coherent speech. It was a daunting task.
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