Longmont Colorado has grand shopping centers that remind me of home. Whole Foods, random tap rooms, accident investigators. It’s midday Monday, there’s a few people in the large, cold, taproom that I’m sitting in. My brother is outside on a conference call. His blood pressure feels high today. I ask him if it’s because of work, he says: No, it’s because of the nitro cold brew. He likes to keep people happy. He stopped at a Target so I could get a cat notebook because I forgot my journal. He asks me twice how the beer is when he gets off the phone. Good, I say, but I don’t want to share sips with him. I have a thing about sharing. I don’t like to share drinks with people, does that make me unsocial? A hypochondriac? Both?
There’s a lot of flies in the taproom, they take turns landing on my large leather backpack. One crawls across the bottom hem of my jean shirt, I let it. It’s loud, there’s a sound of a large vacuum coming from behind the bar where they brew the beer. The bar is long and almost empty. When we walked up to the brewery we had to try two different doors and thought that maybe they were closed, but they weren’t. A childlike man that was making buttons let us in when we couldn’t figure out the door. He offered us both a button as we passed. I smiled and took one.
The only other guy at the bar is talking to the beertender. He is white, everybody here is white. He has a small Pomeranian on the stool next to him. The Pomeranian is staring at me and I want to get up and pet him, but I don’t want the owner to get weird about it. The man says to the beertender, Yeah when I got married the bachelor party was insane. I can hardly hear him over the loud sound in the back, I lean slightly closer to him, all I can make out after that is: 7 hours unaccounted for and I didn’t find my car until 6pm the next day. All his friends know how to get down. It’s the same old same old.
A woman comes in to work as the second beertender, wearing a bright yellow shirt. She is also white. She joins the conversation and the guy with the Pomeranian says Fuck, we partied so hard. He takes a sip of his beer and the Pomeranian sneezes.I want to get out of here. If I ever get married I hope it’s not to somebody who talks about getting fucked up all the time like it’s some kind of accomplishment.
I text a boy from Bumble. I send him a picture of the giant red ceiling fan that is spinning slowly above my head. I’m obsessed with ceiling fans. I think it’s because I’ve always wanted one and never had one. I go to the bathroom and take a selfie in the giant mirror. I send that to the boy on Bumble too. He tells me I look cute. When I get back to my stool there is a fly on the rim of my empty beer. I wave it off with my hand, even though there is nothing left in the glass to drink.
