As I sit in the crumbling bar, I look through my tumbler of cheap scotch with too much ice. The graying ambient light in this wretched place is giving me a headache, yet I wait. This place is tearing down the facades of my once happy (path unbeknownst to me) life, just as surely as the wall paper much past it's prime is peeling off the walls. The few people who are here are engaged in semi-agreeable conversation, but are mainly here just to pass the time wallowing in thick curls of cigarette smoke and the haze of distilled grain. I part my lips just enough to allow the butt-end of my pipe through, and with a sallow face, grievously inhale the toxin. In the past, these actions would have exonerated me, allowing, for a time, the burden of a million years and planets to be lifted from my shoulders.

And then She arrives. My Sophia. My one part, Her two, combining to make three, and gazing upon creation as the fourth. I lift my glass to the bartender, and ask for a bit less ice this time. He grudgingly complies, making sure to fill my glass instead with water. Nequaquam vacui.

"It's been too long." She says with a tired portuguese accent, with a hint of the viality she once carried. "How have you been?"

"I've been better," I hold my breath as I say it, swallowing the words, knowing they shouldn't have escaped. I had bared too much of myself already. This wasn't how it was done, only in the movies, and in childish books was this the course of events. For an instant I wished that the bartender would disappear, along with his smug grin. I wished I could go back and undo it, the fatal blow that had put me here so many decades ago.

"Tell me." I heard her say with an angelic determination. But I was already lost in thought, lost in that moment when the story began, when I fell from the heavens onto this desolate rock, without even a harp to keep me company, and certainly not His favor.