You tell yourself you’re just here for a drink, a song, a place to sit where no one expects anything of you. But the room has already taken your measurements. It notes the way your eyes linger on certain photos, how your shoulders drop when a familiar chord progression hums through the speakers. It rearranges itself around your longing, adjusting the volume, the shadows, the distance between tables, until you feel less like a customer and more like a returning character in a story you didn’t know you’d been missing.
Later, when you’re alone again, you’ll swear it was nothing. Just a bar. Just a night. Yet some part of you will keep circling back to that borrowed sense of belonging, wondering when, exactly, you started renting your own comfort from places designed to make you forget how much of your life still feels unwritten.
