And.
He had been saving it for something.
That was the thing he kept coming back to, sitting there with the bottle on the table and the sun doing what it was going to do whether he watched it or not. He had been saving it for something and he could not remember now what that something was supposed to look like. An occasion. A victory. The right moment arriving with enough ceremony to justify finally opening the thing.
He opened it.
The seal broke without drama. Just the small sound of a thing that had been closed a long time. He always poured two fingers. He poured three and did not look at the glass again after that, just set the bottle down and turned back to the window.
The sun was maybe an hour out.
He had bought the bottle in 2019 at a shop run by a man who knew what he was talking about and didn’t talk more than that. He had carried it home thinking about what he was saving it for the whole ride. Five years of not knowing and the bottle had sat in the back of the cabinet behind things he used regularly, patient the way objects are patient, without effort, without virtue, just there.
He took the first sip.
It was better than he had imagined and he had imagined it plenty. He noted that and looked back at the window.
The neighbor’s kid had left her bicycle in the yard again, on its side in the dead grass, the back wheel still moving slowly from whenever she’d dropped it. He watched it stop. Then it was just a bicycle on its side in dead grass.
He had told himself the bottle was for celebrating. He understood now that he had been lying without knowing he was lying, which is the most efficient kind. There was never going to be a celebration large enough. He had been waiting for something to happen that felt commensurate with what he’d put in, some moment where the scale balanced and the occasion spoke for itself and he would know. He would go get the bottle and pour it and it would taste like vindication.
It tasted better than vindication.
It tasted like wood and time and something better than both of those but he didn’t have a word he trusted.
The pen was on the table where it always was.
He picked it up without deciding to, the way he always had, the same pen for four years, the one with the weight that felt like intention. He turned it between his fingers. The old habit. The pen moving while something in him tried to locate the next true thing. He had been trying to locate it for years. Some mornings he thought he was close.
The red was starting at the edges now.
He watched the sun and turned the pen and let the bourbon sit a moment before swallowing. The three fingers were deliberate and he knew it and he let himself know it, sitting there with the pen moving through his fingers the way it always had, still waiting, still turning, the same question it always asked and him with less and less of an answer.
The red deepened.
He had been happy. Something required saying that. There had been years of it, real happiness, the kind that doesn’t announce itself until you’re on the other side and you look back and see what it was. He had been happy and had not always known it while it was happening and that seemed right. Too much awareness of it would have made it something else.
The sun was in the last of it now.
The pen slowed.
He held them both. The glass in one hand, the pen in the other. Sat with one in each hand and looked at the sun finishing and felt something in him that he did not try to locate or name, just felt it the way you feel a change in the air, the way you feel a season deciding.
He wrote one word.
And.
He set the pen down.
The glass was empty.
The word remained waiting for something that would never come.
The sun went.
He did not turn the lights on.
There was no reason to.