Nine of Wands [Reversed]

The City—LATE AFTERNOON

I have had my office leave me a car from the motor pool. It is an old Volks Bug, and they have left it for me in the near empty parking lot of my hotel. It is full of equipment and likely to get robbed here. And worse, I cannot get it to turn over. 

Plan B.

I wander the City on foot. I have grown gaunt and pallid with sunken black eyes, but I hide this for now with round, blind man’s spectacles, a long, heavy trench coat and a fedora, as if a vampire in the late afternoon sun.

Truth be told. In loneliness I have begun to wither away, now looking like a cross between a wraith and a scarecrow. White, frail and empty. Andrea is here, in the City, someplace, and I try to avoid the pain of seeing her, though somewhat deviously want her to see me and what I have become.

Though long and willowy, I take tiny, cross-legged steps, arms wrapped around myself. Still, though, I seem to glide across the pavement, though teetering like a tree in the wind, under the heavy weight of my head.

Andrea has seen me wandering the City. And she is sad for me, but blames me for not forcing myself to be happy as she does herself. That is her idea of contentment. Ignoring and avoiding the bad. I’ve at least got the avoidance nearly pat at this point. I just cannot ignore the truth.

I know there is a way to transplant my sad soul into a new more muscled chic body. And I even toy with the idea. The Science must be available. But. There is after all, little of my body left. And also,  I could not bear such a plastic, meaningless façade.

Doesn’t matter right now, of course.

My grim frown turns into a smile when I come across a store announcing, WINES AND LIQUOR in the neighborhood. I turn in.