Where Trees Once Stood

He watched them drift past intermittently, discernable by the traces of anxiety and loneliness in their eyes. He believed they weren’t paying for alcohol but rather, a night’s companionship, an evening’s respite. It disturbed Danny, the gradual trickling of loneliness as the night wore on, as if from a leak sprung in some bottomlessly miserable reservoir. Danny was not an alcoholic - but neither were many of these people. It was, perhaps, simply an affinity he shared with them, an unspoken bond that his eyes too often gave away.

"That’ll be twelve ninety-five thanks", murmured Danny with eyes downcast and an outstretched hand. An old man in a tired suit obliged wordlessly. The register shuffled open, and his fingers danced with coins. "Here’s your change, sir. Thank you".

Danny looked down at his hands and sighed inaudibly. He felt exceptionally tired, an escalation of the general weariness that he was accustomed to. Though he scarcely knew Julia (they met at the beginning and end of shifts and held brief exchanges that Danny silently discouraged) Danny thought he knew her type. Quietly, she had fallen into that proportion of humanity for which life had begun to flow contrary to the channel of hope and dream, flooding banks of tolerance. She was secretly going under. Self-delusion was a coping mechanism, a lifejacket that never failed to materialise in times of distress. The old man in the tired suit knew this too well, and the liquor on his breath agreed. So too did the junkies of the world. Who was Danny to contend with such firm conviction? He himself survived life’s ill weather in his own particular way - by staying one step ahead of its erratic nature, embracing chaos and unpredictability before it even arose.

Danny, in many ways, mirrored Julia. The imaginary foundations of her world were friends and relations she pretended were sincere, yet were painfully superficial. Danny wanted no friends or relations of any sort. In fact, he deplored and eluded such threats to the anarchy at the core of his being. A relationship implied emotional structure; this was something so easily destroyed that he considered its creation futile and ultimately hurtful. Occasionally he imagined Julia as a leaf clinging desperately to the tree’s branch in the tempest of a storm, her only true ideology that of Denial. Though the image had its merits, he would neglect to envisage himself similarly; he was the Cynical leaf that fell all too readily, surrendering to the ground without a shred of faith in the wind. The inevitability of gravity reigned supreme.

Quietly, the night wore on. Customers were fairly scarce and anonymous in their dealings at such a late hour. Danny always passed the time by categorising them, and the whole classification process had become a sort of obsession of his. He had found early on that there were only so many groups into which people could be sorted. Everybody had a place. He had just served a middle-aged man who was a scruffy-looking office worker, clearly on the path to a mid-life crisis from which he would emerge dead, or a pathetic drunk. The old woman with the bottle of sherry was without family, sipping throughout the night to the memory of her long deceased husband. Unwavering was Danny’s ability to concoct tales of woe, of suffering and grim inevitability, at the end of which he was reassured by the universality of his own unhappiness. It was, he believed, the new social norm.