Why are your breasts out at the table? How are you buried four beers deep when we’re all waiting on the second round? This world outside your nest is watching. You can scream how you don’t care, how they should get over it, that you are wild and everybody else will need to invent methods of dealing. Be louder. Shout it. If only belligerently confident words changed anything. But they never have, and they never will, because the other people filling the room, breasts kempt, public drinking, whispering with eyes stepping sideways across your table, they don’t hear you. They hear volume. See sway. But as far as the words you say, they could not care less. You spoke every texture of your character mouth closed, just humming along to “Son of a Preacher Man”. They wrote a short story about you in their heads. You and your fix, like a gatekeeper, calming all those corralled into this boxed in, block shaped bar space, justifying their third drink with your fifth. Sitting them up still and sober-like in their seats seeing you drift. Blushing at their laps, while you massage your tits. It’s not judgment. There is no right or wrong, no tall hill with a sign at the base reading get over it, by all means, this behavior is your right, no matter how scary. Be this person. Be who and what you really are. Just know no one in here is reading your journal, or making excuses for you. They’re all short story writers. And you gave them a gatekeeper. A constant in the experiment of what all is or is not ever going to be appropriate. It’s not bad, or wrong really, it just isn’t the story you set out to write. That’s the only reason we care how our decisions, actions and words affect others, because we left the nest with a particular plot-line in mind. And I, for one, didn’t intend to be a drunk dimensional character in some unpracticed writer’s short fiction. If they take my story home with them with the intention of turning it into one of their own, we will both feel mutually judged by one another. Each of our lives should point a finger at the other. And if this was the story you set out to write, well, I just hope it ended at home.