CC17: Pig Just Sleep And Eat

I took a moment to work out the faces around me. Even if it was a pointless exercise, as it usually was, I was prone to putting some effort into facial inspection.

Faces are frustrating things, at once holy honest, and at other times, lying through more than their teeth. Some of the faces in the beer garden were faces I thought I knew from years ago. It was a small town. The odds of seeing the same face more than once in a lifetime were certainly not slim. But age and wear and tear and the alcohol and the night air had muddied them in my recollection. But I scanned them anyway. I lied with my own face to do it, periodically holding my gaze on each one and keeping my expression falsely attentive as the conversations gabbed on around me.

I didn’t see anything new or of interest as I rolled my scrutiny around the faces. The same old mugs, guffawing gobs, crafty smirks, and wandering eyes. My wandering eyes wound up landing on Emer’s face. I realised I hadn’t focused my attention on it in quite some time. I remembered it being a beautiful face once. I wasn’t the only one who thought so. She was used to being chased in her teens, that’s for sure. It was difficult to find that same beauty that fascinated me in the time of our infancy. Maybe all the arguments had a hand in spoiling that attraction between us, weakening our earliest impulses. Or maybe just boredom. Fuck it, I don’t know.

I kept my gaze on her, watched as she smiled and giggled in her pack of others, hoping to see some of that beauty again. She was beautiful when she laughed. There was no doubt about that. I loved the way her eyes flickered on and off in her amusement like Christmas lights. I could sense something stirring again, perhaps my old crush, but it was quickly switched off when she caught me looking at her and changed her amused expression to a great big Fuck off.

‘Pig Just Sleep and Eat.’

Back to the talking and Paidi had just said this. I’d missed the beginning of the story as I was too busy with faces, but I’m sure it was very funny after a few tokes.

‘Pig Just Sleep and Eat.’
Maybe I heard it wrong in my preoccupation.

Paidi didn’t seem to acknowledge me there. This was an old trick of his – he’d always been that way with me. In many of our past encounters, I was aware of him looking everywhere but at me when I was speaking, as though it was his duty to ignore me. But maybe he was just reacting to my socially-twisted tendencies. After all, I had just been looking away while he was speaking, at the faces, at Emer. Maybe he had the right to act that way. I was a rather off-putting guy anyway. Always had been. I could be a proper fucker and folks generally responded in their reactions. After some time in my company, many felt it best to air an unspoken disapproval, by looking away when I was talking, or turning their backs to me. It may have taken Emer longer to catch up with my irritating personal reality, but I was sure she’d caught up by now. There’s nothing worse than having to apologise for your personal reality. That’s all you’ve got, and you’re so fucking sorry about it. You can try your best to make up for your downsides by being as friendly as possible in as many available moments, but that one reveal of your personal reality can make it all flush away. Even so, I kept filling those available spaces with bonhomie until the next gobshite took umbrage.

Fuck it, I’m the pig. Just sleeping and eating would be a fine alternative to this social trial.