Everyday Canvas

After the Last Guest Leaves

After the last guest leaves, you push your way out of the drunken stupor and lean on the back of a chair in your kitchen, assessing the condition of the full sink and the floor tiles that need mopping. Husband is on your trail. It is his way to hover a few paces behind you. Still, you are surprised to see him. He puts his hand on your shoulder.

“Would you like a drink?” You ask as a bizarre opener. You’ve both drunk more than enough.

He laughs. “No. Would you like me help you?”

“No,” you say vehemently, knowing the clean-up job would double, if he did try to help with his clumsiness and his jelly fingers, although you love the gesture. Smiling in appreciation, you hold and squeeze his hand on your shoulder with your opposite hand.

“If you say so!” He strokes your hair and leaves. You fold the hand that held his as if to make his warmth stay longer. Then you kind of wish everyone, too, had stayed longer, maybe forever.

This has to be the turbulence of your heart that questions the status quo, your perpetual craving for company, or is it some kind of a sadness generating a feeling of nostalgia for the crowds, for the extended family you grew up in?

The way you now feel is not an aberrant state after all. There is some sweetness in nostalgia or even in sadness, after an immediate gratification or superficial contentment, and you tell yourself to realize that no one ever lives in perpetual happiness.

You recall Viktor Frankl’s words in the Man's Search for Meaning. “It is well known that humor, more than anything else in the human make-up, can afford an aloofness and an ability to rise above any situation, even if only for a few seconds."

So you do just that. You chuckle and rise. You walk toward the sink, as you tell yourself you were just observing. After all, observing the interplay of states in one’s own psyche is a writer’s job.


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Prompt: What happened after the last guest left? Take this in any direction you choose...