Impermanence

One of the side effects of working in the bar is that you’re never really all that chained to your life. It’s easy to quit and start again, a heck of a lot more so than smoking, and so this aspect starts to bleed into other parts of your life too. Most of us bar lifers rent our apartments (and have a roommate until we’re older than everybody else we know), lease our cars and spent much of our twenties with partners that made our mothers shake their heads.

The job is as permanent as you want it to be, so when all of the patrons start running together and saying things like, “Oh, you’re still here…” in a tone that is soaked with disapproval, why not just leave? On the other side of the world, no one needs to know that your greatest claim to fame is the ability to carry three plates and strangers don’t have the luxury of being disappointed in your writing career if they don’t know a thing about it.

So, this is how I end up leaving, working that final shift that ends boozily with my trying to remember if I locked the back door of the bar and wondering why anybody is surprised that I have a worse credit score than all of the newly immigrated cooks.

I think my mother is hopeful that each time I’ll come back as someone more responsible (as if each trip is a sort of reincarnation, and who can blame her, I’ve been to Asia so many times that it’s easy to be confused on this point), that I’ll buy a condo, keep a plant alive and stop trying to convince my doctor to tie my tubes.

But it just never quite works. I just come back with a new set of antibodies for whatever parasites I encountered, a depletion of my savings and no recollection of whose field I parked my car in—realizing only now that I forgot to take the battery out all those months ago and by now it’s surely dead.

And so I return to the dimly lit bar, where no one can tell that I’m the same shade of pale I was when I left, having spent my days at the beach under a vast umbrella, where people ask me what I’ve learned: to travel light, that books are the heaviest things you carry (and somehow the most valuable when you sell them along the way), that it’s helpful to learn a bit of the language before you go, that no one appreciates bare shoulders and knees in a temple, and that not being able to leave still seems akin to stopping breathing.