You haven’t been the same, ever since he left. I’ve watched you struggling bravely, trying to hide the pain, but you can’t conceal it from us.
He had been your drinking partner for so long, and you had drained many cups together – yes, together, in sorrow and in joy, with your mutual love for beer providing comfort in dark hours and pleasure in merrier ones. But it couldn’t last forever, nothing does, and one day he was gone.
In the first few days, you grew pale and ill, and although you blamed the flu, we all knew that it was grief. Then, we stopped seeing you, but we never stopped looking for you. We needed you, and you knew it. So, slowly, you began drifting back. Sometimes you disappeared again, articles unwritten, but we understood. You can’t write articles with a broken heart. And you never wrote a single word about beer again.
In the beginning, you said you would look for another partner, but slowly that quest faded away in everyone’s mind. We stopped looking to you for guidance on craft brews. Whether every taste became bitter to you, alone and bereft of your broskie, or if you just guzzled every drop down too quickly, the taste reminding you of happier times and the alcohol numbing the pain – that we never knew. We couldn’t bear to ask.
We do know that you walked like a ghost among us, and when we tried to find someone else for you, you mumbled excuses and left. It wasn’t that there was a problem with the curious new fellow, or the eager young frosh; your heart belonged to someone else, and no one else could stimulate your taste buds or your pen. Beer goggles might help, we thought, but you never gave them a chance; it would do a dishonour to his memory.
And in the end, you slipped away again, mourning in solitude. We rarely saw you, and when we did, you were drinking whiskey, not beer. His name hung in the room over us, and if we mentioned it, you begged us to stop. Everything was fine, you said. But it wasn’t; we felt his absence in every article you didn’t write, every drop of beer you didn’t drink. Or did you drink, alone, your tears falling into the cup making it as salty as we were?
There was no proper memorial; only an image of beer glasses, lined forlornly against the sunset, with the words “Goodbye, Tristan”.
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