Drinking a Bottle of Wine

by James Babbs

I’m drinking a bottle of wine and writing about heart break I’m thinking about the past because there’s not enough love in the world there’s not enough love in the world and the sun feels warm upon my face I decided to come home and sit outside because it’s another beautiful day for weeks it kept raining and now the days have turned warm and sunny and there’s a great sense of calm permeating the air

The wine I’m drinking is red wine it’s cheap red wine but I like the way it tastes I buy two or three bottles of it at a time whenever I get the chance but this is my last bottle because I’ve drank all the rest and I guess I need to go and buy some more because I know there will be other days like this

I don’t have any wine glasses so I drink from one of those oversized coffee mugs and it only takes a couple of times filling it up before I empty the bottle and I can feel my face growing warm and that slight buzzing at the back of my brain and I feel like talking to somebody and I know in the morning I’ll have a terrible headache because wine more than any other alcohol always gives me one

But what about heart break I said I was writing about heart break and I know it happens to everyone and I know there are lots of reasons for it but mostly I’m thinking about a beautiful woman who decided she didn’t want to be with me anymore and it wasn’t because I did anything wrong and it wasn’t because of something I said or the way I treated her but just because I was something she didn’t really want so she had to let me go

I remember how she tried to tell me when I showed up at her house and her son was there playing video games and she didn’t have much to say and when her son left she didn’t come over and sit next to me but she just stayed on the end of the couch and she said she just wanted us to be friends and she said she wanted me to stay and eat dinner with her but I told her I couldn’t I told her I had to go

But then we got back together sleeping together again and I didn’t think about the friends thing I just thought I could change her mind I thought I could convince her of something but finally it just kind of fizzled out and there wasn’t any huge fight and nobody got angry we just felt this heavy kind of sadness settle in the space between us

I throw the empty bottle in the trash hear it thump against the bottom but I’ve started saving the corks putting them in the bottom drawer of my desk because I want to see how many bottles of wine I’ve been drinking and right now there are seven corks which doesn’t seem like very many but I’ve only been keeping them for the last couple of weeks