Her tone becomes harder and takes on more of a bitter edge as she progresses. I start focusing on every word, trying to ferret out what she’s telling me about her life in between the lines.
“Is the point of life happiness? Are rats on a treadmill happy? If they could speak, they’d probably tell you they’re not unhappy,” she says with a lift of her hand. “They get on that fucking wheel of their own volition every. Single. Day. And they run themselves into the ground. So, what is happiness? How do you know when you’re happy? Is happiness just the absence of sadness? Is the point of life just not to be sad?”
My heart hammers so hard in my chest I can see each beat ripple the fluid in the glass I’m gripping so tightly it’s in danger of shattering. If anyone deserves to be happy, it’s Blaire. But she’s quite obviously profoundly sad.
“Or maybe the Beatles really were tapped into the universal consciousness and all we need is love. Maybe love is the golden ring on the carousel of life. Could it be that we’re intended to spend our days perusing a transient and ethereal emotion? Something so fleeting that, when you grip it too tightly, it slips through your fingers and vanishes like smoke on a breeze? Something that repeatedly leaves your heart ripped open and bleeding out any hope that it even exists?”
The peal of anguish lacing her words rips my heart open. She’s not been hurt by love. She’s been destroyed by it. Acid rolls up my throat, knowing I played a part in that.
“Even if the point of life is just not dying, we all fail there eventually too.”
She pulls the mic from the stand and walks to the side of the stage. “From where I stand, life looks something like this: We get up. We get up. We get up,” she says, raising the hand not holding the mic higher with each “up.”
She drops her hand. “We fall down.”
She moves to the other side of the stage. “We get up. We get up. We get up,” she says, repeating the process.
“We fall down.”
She comes back to the middle of the stage and sits at the edge with her legs dangling. “Sometimes we fall on our own.” She holds a hand palm out to the audience, then thrusts it forward. “Sometimes we’re pushed.”
Who pushed you, Blaire? Was it me?
“So, is that the point? Because, honestly, it seems the most likely scenario. Life is just some sort of cosmic joke. No matter how hard we strive for happiness, knowledge, love, success, no matter how close we get to grabbing that golden ring, or how sure we are that we get the point of the whole thing, at some point the universe is going to shove us down just to prove us wrong.”
I didn’t think she saw me, but as she gains her feet, her gaze locks on mine, and I know I’m right. I did this to her.
“There is no fucking carousel ring.” She gives her head a bitter shake. “Hell, there’s not even a carousel. The joy you felt while you were riding—the certainty that you’d weathered the shit storm of life and the wind in your hair was your reward—it was all just a fucking illusion.”
She turns and walks back to the mic stand in the middle of the stage, snapping it back into the bracket.
“The point of life is that it’s pointless.”
There’s a minute of dead silence as she spins for the stairs, and then the group at her table in the front stands and starts to clap. Within a few seconds, the whole room is standing.
But Blaire doesn’t stop for the hugs or high fives she’s being offered. She doesn’t even seem to notice there are other people in the room. She comes directly to where I’m now standing, next to my barstool, and stops in front of me.
The scores post, but I don’t hear a word Craig is saying. All I know is Blaire’s desperate gaze.
“You had a beard last time I saw you.”
At her statement, my stomach plummets into my shoes. I lift a hand to my freshly shaven face. I only had that beard while I was with Hannah. And I was always with Hannah. She was right, I was hiding behind her like a shield. I thought that’s what I needed to do. Not for my own safety. For everyone else’s. For Blaire’s. I needed to keep her safe from me.
I take her elbow and usher her to the door. When we hit the sidewalk, she pulls her arm out of my grasp and keeps going. I follow, because, let’s face it, I’m helpless to do anything else. I’d follow her into the pits of hell if I could have her there.
“Are you still together?” she asks without looking at me.
“No.”