30/30 #6

Secret Keeper If this bar could talk... Oh the secrets it could share! The celebrations of promotions & engagements, The mourning of lost lives and loss of healed hearts. It could identify the greatest fears of those who thought they were only confiding in the bottom of the top shelf, coke mixed glass. Ingrained in its sticky surface you can see the hopes of the anxious, read the stories of hundreds like Braille in its dents and divots. Heck, you can smell the courageous and the desperate wafting like a misty fog if you know what to look for...& Let's face it, we all know what to look for.

This bar is a dear Jack Daniels diary entry for many, no lock, no key, no hidden beneath the mattress safety, just a soul sweating a ring into its pages. It can only gossip about your stories with the bar stools, who've physically felt the weight of your pains and your joys, It adds the stool's impression of you like footnotes, turns the page and waits for the next dam of heartbroken to break like underestimated levies do. Turns the page and waits for the next newly ringed finger to slosh joy over the edges of a shot glass, champagne toast, margarita on the rocks with the girls. Turns the page and waits for the man with a wife and newborn sitting at home looking for the paycheck he can't show up with, providing for family suddenly swapped out with providing proof to the government of impoverished enough to qualify for insufficient aid to support them all.

This bar could tell you about the women that make rent just from sitting pretty, passing glances at the vulnerable men whose morals have been bent by hormones, loneliness and circumstance. Watches the men as they slug back the last of their beer and  slink off into dark corners that hold the moans of strange women that aren't their wives, whose real names they'll never know.

It has witnessed transactions that could land a lifetime in a jail cell, has seen the truth of the lie told to the slightly suspecting on the other end of the line, this bar could convict us all I bet of one thing or another.

But this bar, and countless others like it, they wouldn't spill our secrets the way we do, they will let us leave behind the residue of our best and worst moments, accepting a syrupy surface from our liquor infused confessions as a trade-off. Not even if they could talk would they tell.

See, the key to becoming a secret keeper is in the keeping. That's the purpose of the  bar, it keeps some of us sane, keeps some of us necessarily numb and keeps us all company when we need to talk to an old friend.