The Night Cafe
The nights have been slowly eating away at the light of each day. The air has become ice cold. Winter is approaching faster than usual this year. But tonight, tonight, it’s a rainy late autumn night. A man in a white suit enters a lonely bar. Every day, he puts on a white suit to work, subconsciously wishing that it will make him stand out and be noticed by his coworkers, but he never is.
He watches at the pool table in the center of the bar. The bar is scarce of customers but filled with half-drunken glasses of liquor. He does not notice the uncleanliness surrounding him, or the lonely people drenched from the rain, drinking away their sorrows; looking to find the other half of their hearts at the bottom of the glass in front of them. The man just stares at the pool table.
He concentrates on the three balls by the pool table tip of the stick. He notices the difference in each ball. Each of the three balls has a different color or colored stripe around it. His eyes have a direct focus on the white ball. He wonders, without the white ball, the game wouldn’t operate. The white ball is plain and simple, but one of the most important. The game of pool would not be a game without the white ball.
He sees the white balls’ simplicity as necessary and crucial to the game. All his life, he has been the white ball; plain and simple. But, he envies the ball because it is needed and important. He wonders why he has never been needed or felt important. The man in the white suit will never admit it, but he does not mind living alone, rather, he just cannot stand being lonely. He breaks his stare, wanting to sit down and find the other half of his heart at the bottom of the glass, just like the others in the bar. Rather, he glances at the clock.
The man in the white suit has to get up early for work tomorrow morning. So, with hesitation, he leaves the lonely bar and joins the quiet, rainy night; walking into the darkness to go home, alone with piles of heavy pool table balls in the pockets of his suit.