Sanctuary

Just give it a read.

  That old pub, steeped in history. 

  Two friends are sat, each with a glass of amber coloured ale. They are exchanging conversation, uncomfortable, forced smiles straining their faces. 

  This is the pub of their youth. The pub where they collectively conspired, dreamed, believed. When they entered, their dreary surroundings ceased to be. The demons plaguing that small town would relent, just for a moment, when they claimed that pub for themselves - sanctuary.

- 

  "We will bring our kids to this spot. When we have them. And we'll tell them about the old days." 

-

   Those words chime in his ears now, but they sound distant, surreal, as he looks at his friend. The same mess of dirty blonde hair, the same stubble, similar clothes even... But age has cast lines upon his face, the smoking has yellowed his teeth and something has faded. 

-

  "I tell you now, when we first visited Berlin, we made our jokes but I never thought I'd actually head off to live there. (But I suppose I never thought I'd have met her.) We did it my friend. We've left this town well and truly behind us. In just shy of a month I'll have left the whole bloody country and you're down in Brighton."

  It isn't that simple, though. To leave a town, to leave a country. This brief window of unemployment has given him time to think.

-

  The monologue - similar to the monologues he would launch into in his youth - continues. 

  "Leaving a place behind, I've done it so often now, admittedly not on this scale... I leave a little piece of me behind in every place I rest my head. I leave memories littering streets where nobodies tread. I leave people, family. Connections."

  He doesn't say it; he thinks it though - I have lost you. In a profound and real way, I've lost you. Since we left this town we've lost that common frame of reference, that background that binds us together. I still love you because we pledged to be brothers... it's just we are not brothers now in the way we used to be brothers. 

-

  Pub life continues around the duo. People warily chart their path to the toilets, retaining balance a difficulty to be overcome as those beers start kicking in. Some drift outside to share a cigarette with small fires burning in the vast night sky. Staff busily tend to the mass of humanity congregating at the bar, eager for their bevs.

  What is a pub? It is a crucible of human interaction, cohesion. Friendships, relationships, they are born here, they grow here. 

  And some will end here.

- 

  "You're too negative! You always have been."

  The friend's smile becomes genuine, affectionate. He feels a sense of continuity; he is occupying his youthful self and retracing his steps back into a dynamic that mattered to him, a lot, once upon a time. 

  "You've lost fractions of yourself but the truth is you give things up in order to receive. You gave all of this up for the adventure you decided to embark on and you'd never have truly become you without that adventure. And when that adventure became static and stale, you started a different one with someone new."

-

  Their attention shifts from each other to two younger lads, trading jokes, their bodies jerking with fits of laughter.

-

  "The truth is that you never know what you'll have to give up next but by the same token you never know what you'll receive and that's life."

-

  They are out in the car park now, both about to set off. 

  And he takes a moment to think about what his friend has said and the fear of the journey is cast aside. 

  The friends shake hands, wish each other well and then they're on their way. 

  Life served to sever them from one another eventually. He became happy in Berlin, lived his life out there and died in a country where he finally enjoyed a feeling of being at home. 

  His friend would go on to become a filmmaker and a father. He would be abundantly good at both, with his humanity, warmth and good humor never failing him in either endeavor. 

-  

  Bitterness touched him from time to time. There were moments when he felt loneliness and he cursed life for hollowing out the old bonds he clung to, which had been so strong. But these bonds remained, in some real way. They remained in the illusive depths of the past and though the memories that defined the friendship became vague there was a sensation, something there he could reach to in moments of solitude. And, as his friend had rightly predicted, life kept on giving him enough to keep living.