“I love you. Marry me,” Travis says, grinning like an idiot at Dizzy. He is tipsy and loving and has just plopped down next to his Caribbean ocean blue-eyed crush.

“Hey everybody,” Dizzy says, talking to the whole table, “Look who it is! It’s Travis!” She leans over and gives Travis a big, wet kiss on the cheek. It’s a mutant double-date: Travis, Ian, Kristin and Dizzy, four people that have love but can’t see one another, all sitting at a table by the front door of Mean Mike’s. Travis and Dizzy are on one side, Kristin and Ian opposite them. No more perfect pair of pairs that could never exist ever existed.

“Don’t avoid the question,” Travis says, trying to be irritated—something he can’t manage with Daphne. She looks at him and beams, and he smiles back.

“I told you we’ll get married when we’re thirty.”

“Oh c’mon,” Travis whines.

“What?”

“You’ll have found a perfect, gorgeous, rich guy by then.”

Thinking about it while sipping on a jack and coke, Daphne nods excitedly at Travis with a bright smile, and replies, “Okay!”

“Well —” Travis utters, still whining, “you’ll never marry me then.”

Daphne smiles again. “Okay.” When Travis looks forlorn, she stares Travis seriously in the eyes and then begins petting his shorn hair with a concerned look. “You can be my puppy.”

Throwing his hands up in the air, Travis gives up as Nick sets a drink in front of him and then scoots past Dizzy to take a seat. “Thanks,” Travis says as Nick sits down.

“How come you only say this stuff when you’re drunk?” Daphne asks, chuckling because she thinks Travis is cute when she frustrates him.

“The love is too painful to bare when I’m sober.”

“Well, I think you should try to say it when you’re sober.” Daphne lingers for a moment, and then raises her eyebrows.

He doesn’t want it to be a joke. “You’d never be seen with me if we were sober.”

Tapping the ashtray with her cigarette, Dizzy replies with aplomb, “That’s true.”

Then, snapping out of his anyway feigned self-pity, thanks to an errant thought, Travis offers neutrally, “I wrote a song for you.”

“Really?” Daphne asks.

“Yeah.”

“That’s so sweet. I wanna’ hear it.”

“I’ll bring my guitar next time I come over.”

“Yay!” Dizzy cries, triumphant. “Is it good?”

Travis shakes his head. “No. It sucks.”

“No!” Dizzy yells and slaps Travis on the shoulder.

Taking a drink, Travis offers, “It sucks less than my other stuff.”

Daphne looks at Travis seriously and says, “Your stuff doesn’t suck…”

“I suppose,” Travis admits.

“You have to play it for me this week. I’m leaving Saturday.”

“You are?”

Dizzy nods.

“I thought you were getting a job here.”

She shrugs.

“Well, I’ll play it for you some time this week then.”

“Just come over. I’m not doing anything but packing a few things.”

“Okay.”

“When’re you having another party?” Nick interjects.

“Not for a while. There’s nobody here right now.”

“Yeah. That’s true,” Nick agrees.

Leaning over, Travis wraps Daphne in a hug. She accepts graciously, putting her hand on his arm. “You’re my inspiration—” he blubbers with exaggeration, to lighten the undertow, “my muse.” Despite his best efforts at melodrama, he is deeply sincere.

Daphne looks at Travis sweetly before Nick says, “He said earlier that you’re a fat nag.” She hits Travis in the shoulder again and refuses to speak to him for ten minutes.

Travis just sits for a while, kicking his feet beneath him. As Ian and Kristin talk about photography, and Nick tells Dizzy about his Pittsburgh deal, Travis lights up a cigarette.
Content to just be among his friends for a while, and not contribute, he watches people walking by the front of the bar—some peering in cautiously, some passing, some walking in. There is a loose stream of them—strangers—although in the moment, all of them lovely, all of them potential friends. There are couples and gangs, the occasional party and loners. And then, Travis is thinking about John, who has already gone home for the evening. The only question in Travis’s mind is whether John has said all he wants to. Never wanting to be a genuine irritation, Travis had let John go home without too much fuss or too many questions. Travis let his friends mean what they said, and if they said they had nothing to say, then there was nothing to be said. The best friend he could be was a present one.

Watching flocks of sidewalk revelers glide by, something unknown, something dark, eats at him and he thinks: he’s ugly / she’s not / he’s confident / she’s insecure / she’s trying too hard / he’s laughing too loud / she has no faith in anything—supposedly all seen in their eyes, but really all judgment. That’s not what eyes are for, they’re for connection. He knows that. The thoughts come from a shallow and trapped tide pool on his beach, not as deep as the ocean of his music that is a Mariana trench of love. All his thoughts are inherently wrong at just this moment to Travis, staring out the window. These thoughts irritate him, but have him in a headlock. He isn’t sure where along the way he’d started becoming a cynic. Travis thinks about his assumptions these days—what true love is. Romance, lust, and some universal sense of solidarity all blur into a deflated hope that at least one of the three could be unadulterated. He sleeps on his entrenched observations of disappointment like a pea under a stack of mattresses. He can ignore them if he tries. But that cynicism is there. He is tired, spinning his drink on the table top. It isn’t his brain or his body—it’s his soul. He is tired and doesn’t know why, watching these fellow passengers on the carousel, spinning and happy, for the moment, unsure that he wants to mount the ride.

Read the whole thread: Carousel Cowboy

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