Accidentally at a Halloween Party in a Bar

I’m sitting in a bar on halloween weekend, but I didn’t really mean to. The boys are at a Gymnastics Halloween Party, where neither of them wore their costumes, but Tucker’s face is on the worn-off second day of a werewolf face painting, and oddly, Tyler’s face is painted in my makeup, which led him to ask me fourteen thousand times if his lipstick had worn off before we left. The rest of him is dressed as some kind of karate ninja.

I’ve only been to this restaurant in the day time, for quiet little luncheons with girlfriends. Turns out, this place is like a lady of the night, wearing an entirely different atmosphere after 7 pm. I mean, oh my great day, I went in pursuit of a place to settle in with my laptop and a cup of coffee and quiet Jack Johnson ambiance. Instead, I’m at a Monster Mash, where sports announcers are shouting at me and there are strangely too many onions in my salad which has never been true in my life. I’m the girl who asks for extra onions on an onion sandwich. Or, I would, if anyone ever thought of making an onion sandwich.

Someday soon I will tell you why I have been in bed for three days, why I took my son to the ER and then I became the patient, and what I’ve learned about pencil lead. But I’m not doing that right now.

I’m not doing that right now because I’m busy reminding myself not to go home, or I’ll go back to bed. And I’m reminding myself that I’m sad because my physiology has been through the wringer in the last three days, and this is a pattern I can expect, not a backslidden slope into depression.

As an added bit of irony, the heroines in the book I’m reading are stranded in Laramie, Wyoming because their car broke down and the bartender tells them that most people in that town only live there because their car broke down and they never left. So they are terrified and sad and exhausted, and they are my company this evening.

I’m not talking about hard truths tonight because a girl’s gotta give herself a break from thinking and feeling and processing.

And haven’t I chosen just the place to do it.

I’m going to go back to picking onions out of my salad.  I think Batman and a couple of witchy princesses want my table.