I closed my eyes while the girl sat alone, unaware of the agony she was responsible for twenty feet away. I finished my drink in a single gulp and had planned to stand but my ass was screwed into the stool. My heart was pounding. Why did this make me so nervous? Just another person, alone, sitting in a bar. What harm can come by saying hello? I’m twenty-seven years old; what the hell is the matter with me that the prospect of speaking to another person incites a terror so great that I’d rather streak down the city streets all the way back home? Do I fear she’ll see my intentions, know that every time she looks away I’ll probably stare at her crotch and drool? Do I fear looking foolish, or being rejected? Of course I do. All of the above. We all do. But still.

Throughout most of my life I’d always believed that by some odd miracle in the mysterious ways of women, every girl I happened to be in love with instinctively knew of my longing, of my deep desire to be with her and of the countless hours I had spent creating idealistic possibilities of our life together, and that in my eyes any other life that deviated from this would be nothing short of oppression. They knew of these thoughts and yearnings, and by not approaching me these girls were in fact attesting to their disinterest in anything connubial or even sexual; they were, in essence, rejecting me. I sometimes took this as an affront, even when, in the years following college, I would sometimes cross paths with these same girls and would learn that a few I’d pined for had in fact liked me back. I never accepted this news in any reassuring or validating way. It just made me angry, and despite my better judgment, my face would turn into a scowl, and in a whine I scarcely recognized as my own, I’d ask, “Why the hell didn’t you ever say anything?” To which the only reply has ever been, “Well, why didn’t you?”

“Fifteen seconds.”

Don’t think about it, Stratton, just do it. You can’t think of these things, you’ll only make yourself anxious. Just do it. Just act.

“Ten seconds.”

I stood, took a deep breath, and began walking.

“Atta boy,” Gene said behind me.

Each step was a mile. I felt I was walking on razor blades, walking the trail of tears, every step another chance to turn around and say to hell with the hundred bucks. But I kept forging ahead. Another deep breath right before I reached her, just another girl. Alone. In a bar.