Tears and laughter...

The music is loud and the crowd at the bar tonight is raucous. I'm a stranger here...and that's ok--it's easier for me to just sit back and watch people than try to shout over the top of loud music.

He's a friend of a friend...and he's enjoying himself. His face is careworn and grizzled, but his eyes snap with mischief and he laughs loudly--it's contagious. He greets the women with hugs and kisses and dance offers and the men with an invitation to a game of pool.

Our eyes meet across the room and he dances my way, waving the pool cue to clear a path and bows deeply when he finally stands in front of me. He offers to buy me a beer and asks me why I'm so serious. I smile and he tells me I need to laugh more. He begs for, and gets, a kiss on the cheek for luck in his next pool game and tells me he'll buy me a drink if my kiss brings him victory in the game.

He wins. And buys himself another drink to celebrate. He plays another game and loses. And buys himself another drink to help him forget the list of losses stacked against him.

His eyes find mine again. I smile. He doesn't buy it. No dancing across the room this time--he makes a direct line for me and plants himself solidly in front of me. "Why are you so sad?" I tell him I'm not sad and he edges closer. He asks me again, more intently and insistently this time, "why are you sad?" and I look into his eyes and know I could drown in the depths of heartache and knowledge and understanding I see swimming there.

How do I answer that? How do I tell him that, without him uttering a word of it, I know his story...a life of disappointment and lost love and abandonment and despair? How do I tell him that life is bigger and hope always remains? How do I tell him that I'll go home tonight and weep the tears for him that I'm fighting to hold back right now? How do I tell him that I'm full of anger and overwhelmed with despair when I look at history and see how our government has played a part in the "something" insidious and ugly and hopeless and evil that brought us to the point where we're standing at that very moment? And how do I tell him that my heart has somehow found kinship and comfort and, in some odd way, "home" in a veritable stranger?

I don't tell him any of that. I tell him that people disappoint me and I'm tired of being hurt. He steps nose-to-nose with me, eyes still inviting me to dive into the haven he's offering, and lets me know without saying a word that he knows I'm giving him the "easy out" answer.

Sometimes that's all I can manage.