I've been right there beside you, on the next barstool, mumbling a curse in irritation when you jostle me on the way to the john. I've been the guy on the train across the aisle from you when you ride home at the end of the night, scratching someone's initials into the seat back, crying over a vision of a broken dream.
I've sat up and sung the 4a.m. blues too many times for all the wrong people, and sworn to uphold every bit of cynical barstool philosophy that no one believes, especially me.
I've tripped over the cracks in my own psyche and tumbled into love again like dropping into a vat of tar where I sink out of sight without a cry for help. I've grown so terrified to dream that a million angels have walked by me unnoticed, any one of whom I could have lived with for a lifetime of two.
Somewhere the one who should have been my wife is sleeping beside another man because I was a coward, and maybe just like me she wakes up feeling sick and empty in the dead hours of the night, missing someone she never even met.
