Deja Vu

Ashton sat at the bar, nursing his stout stoically. The bartender across him was busy wiping down the glasses, dutifully following his request in leaving him alone.

Friday night. A typical night of reverie and fun, as people take a break from the week-long work-fest, but for a couple of hours.

The bar was as dead as a nun's sex life. Pandemic rules. There was a limit of no more than twenty five people allowed at a bar the size of this one, and even then, there was still a hard limit of table sizes of no more than five.

That ruled out the usual TGIF after work gatherings. So most people did not even bother to come out.

Ashton didn't care. He just wanted his stout. He had been deprived of it for nearly six months when he was forced to be working from home. It wasn't that he missed the stout, but that he missed the autonomy that he had from just going places after work that was not his home.

His girlfriend of five years had left him. Said that it couldn't work out. He thought of protesting, but gave up in the end.

What was there to protest? A relationship involved two people; if one did not have the commitment, how could the other change anything?

It also did not help that it happened during the time when the city was forced to do a month-long lock down to curb the rise in infected cases as emergency legislation and budgets were being put together to reduce the socio-economic impact of it all.

How could he do anything in those circumstances?

Ashton took a gulp of his stout.

The sole waitress was lounging about at a corner near the bar, responding to someone's requests every now and then. There were less than fifteen present, and it was clear that she was more than enough for them, especially since the bartender did double duty and helped with serving as well.

Ashton saw, but he did not care enough. That was just how things were, nothing for him to care about there.

Life was slightly less meaningless before when he had a future life with her to look forward to. But with her having left him, and the great pause in social life from the pandemic, and the rising economic uncertainty that was bound to come, life was more meaningless than before.

But what was Ashton to do?