and there's no remedy for memory

your face is like a melody

She sits at the bar alone, her fingers curled loosely around a glass of bourbon, her eyes glazed and unfocused; it's her third glass, though she knows it will be her last. It doesn't take much to get her well and truly drunk and tonight she only needs to be drunk enough. Drunk enough to ignore the spirits, the shimmering at the edge of her peripheral vision or the all-too tangible and obtrusive voice of anger or despair, the woman murdered by her husband or the wide-eyed little boy who had only been trying to get his ball from the street.

Angry spirits are the worst but restless ones aren't far behind; they follow her around like lost children begging her to listen to their woes, to help them. How is she supposed to help them when she cannot even help herself? It is exhausting, trying to talk an irate dead man down so that he might pass on to wherever it is that they go when they leave the earth.

Utterly exhausting.

She cringes, remembering the elderly woman who had flickered in and out of view from across the street as she had turned into the VooDoo Room; ghosts like that are often too abstract to communicate. They are already hovering between this plane and the next, barely hanging on to this world and whatever it is that they left behind. Those, she can handle. Those, she doesn't mind.

It's the others that drive her to drinking so that she might more easily ignore them. Violent spirits, sobbing ghosts. Children who had only just begun their little lives and yet here they are, wondering the spirit world - just another lost soul. The list goes on, never seems to end and that is what drives her to near madness, to the fear of leaving her own home at times. She sighs heavily, raising the glass back to her lips and downing the rest of the whiskey without so much as a flinch.

"I'm ready to close my tab," she says to the bartender and he nods in her direction, promising to be right over once he finishes making the drinks for a couple who had just come in and sat at the other end of the long bar. She nods back to him, a whimsical smile playing across her lips. Alcohol does that to her, lowers her inhibitions as it does for most but also eases the anxiety that often possessed her when confronted by other humans.

It is nice being able to talk to another person without her palms sweating and her heart racing, even if she did have to be mildly drunk to do it.