You were having a bad day. A truly horrible day.
You know, a day where you wake up from a nightmare and find yourself suffering from a pounding headache, an icepick banging on the soft part of the back of your neck.
You get up and splash water on your face and swallow half a bottle of extra-strength Tylenol. You pour a coffee and sink into your 50-year-old couch and wait for things to calm down. They never do.
Finally, sometime that morning, you go outside. An attempt to not think about IT.
What you should be doing with your life? Who you should be making happy? Where you’ll get your next paycheck? And all that jazz.
The sun hits you like a brick but you keep walking. It helps keep you calm and in place. You walk and walk and walk. The numbness finds a kind of rhythm and hurts less.
Then, you remember you had a meeting at your place. Some famous professor wanted to interview you about what it’s like to be a poet. And all that jazz.
You high tail it back. You forget about that headache and all those questions you have no answer for. You arrive back, an hour late for the meeting. Nobody there. Just a note on the door, reading -
Fine. You missed your shot at the big time. So, you head back out, down the street and into a cafe. Maybe some caffeine will help.
You enter and order a double-double. Walk back to the dark part at the back. It’s calmer on the nerves there. You’re ready to hide and fight your demons there. Then, you see him. The famous professor who was going to interview you.
You can’t hide. It’s too dark back there. In any case, he’s already spied you. So you walk up to him and do the only thing right and proper. You apologize and beg his forgiveness. After all, you are an honest bloke, a nice guy. A truthful, truth-filled poet.
He’s angry, still angry after all your profuse apologizing. You can sense it, even see it. No matter how you put it, how sorry you said you were - this pompous ass still can’t forgive.
He asks you why “Why weren’t you at home?” and you decide to tell him the truth. How you were having a bad day and went out into life, the streets, to find some semblance of balance and normalcy and then, you lost track of time.
You apologize for the umpteenth time, saying how you rushed to find him here at the cafe, after arriving home and being reminded of the meeting, after you saw his name tacked, to the door.