Personal Narrative

PERSUASION & PRESSURE
It was not hard for him to recall how he met what he would later call the love of his life. Regardless of all of the times he had tried in vain to forget the amatory recollections, all of the nefarious glasses of wine he had imbibed in attempts to wash away the taste of her cherry lipstick, or all of the lines he had drawn to stay away from every inch of her. He could not abscond the sillage of her Chanel N°5 that always lingered after her departure, nor could he ever fail to remember the emanation of her Marlboro Red’s that stay stuck to her clothes like last night's affairs.

Every word that tumbled from her deceitful lips was etched into his mind and written twice over. Every sigh that cascaded from her sunken mind

He takes the glass and brings it to his scornful mouth, the rivers of whiskey streaming down his throat much smoother than his self-condemnation.

He was hoping for an answer. An answer, or at least something fathomable, at the bottom of a glass handed to him by trembling hands and plenitudes of disappointment. Something that his drug addled mind and quite pathetic excuse for a heart could latch onto rather than a threadbared string of guilt, or rather, the body of a woman.

“I believe that guilt is the strongest human emotion. The merciless executioner of the mental complex, I guess you could say." Co says, head propped on her hands. She's staring off into the distance, far beyond the walls of this bar, and probably far beyond anything any other could comprehend. He on the other hand, cannot see past anything except the chest of the waitress and his own remorse. “Guilt is the revolving wheel of the conscience. For one moment, you’re satisfied- and then it’s like happiness never existed. You find fault in everything, and I think that finding fault is what keeps us from finding

“But could those exact feelings not emerge from fear? Fear that you, yourself, are not good enough? Co, fear is what halts progression, not guilt. Guilt is merely an afterthought due to the regret of mistakes. Such a pitiful emotion could not possibly be the strongest.”

Co sits up in her bar stool and attempts to compile the hurricane of thoughts, however, such tenebrous storms could not possibly be encompassed, and she ends up stuttering over her words. “T-there is no such thing as a mistake, Ralph. Mistakes are merely the man-made way for us to deal with the failure of our expectations. We as humans, act on intuition. And when something doesn’t go the way we expected it to, we call it a ‘mistake’ so we don’t have to deal with the repercussions. If you should fear anything, it’s the fact that you cannot admit to your wrongdoings that you so chose to carry