“Do you ever wonder what it would be like if we weren't like this?”
Ruth asked, her eyes fixed on the swirling smoke of her cigarette. Dirk shrugged,
“Not really, I kinda like how we are.”
Ruth chuckled softly.
“Me too, but sometimes I can't help but wonder what it would be like if we were something else.”
Ruth and Dirk's relationship was a mystery, even to themselves. Despite knowing each other for a significant portion of their lives, they never quite fit into the traditional mould of friendship. Yet, there was an undeniable closeness between them, akin to that of a love labourer and a customer, in Ruth's case, or the bond between two regulars in the same sticky, damp, dark corner bar, all history with no future.
Currently, they sat on opposite ends of said bar’s wooden counter. Just like them, the place had a history as well. It used to be called the YokoMono. It had been closed down for dubious reasons involving poor management, landlord disputes, and just that tiny bit of racial tension and gentrification. Anyhow, it had been closed and replaced by a hip coffee shop that was a lot nicer to look at, probably more profitable and certainly less prone to annoying the neighbours. It was also incredibly boring. Time went on and five centuries later, the coffee shops, had come and gone, to be replaced by a man named Stanislav Popow, who never paid homage to the past, but miraculously made a bar out of the place again, that resembled the old Yokomono to the grain of wood on the counter. Now it was called “Stanni’s”. It featured the same 500-year-old pool table, some benches, and tables tugged away in alcoves to sit at, a narrow corridor, a ground floor half a meter below street level sidelined by windows that from the outside were often considered doors, and a mix of people from all slices of life, practically living in there, and going about their day or night or whatever inconsequential number the clock was pointing at. Stanni himself was well-beloved, if not for his caring, indifferent attitude, then certainly for his signature drink that he never failed to talk his unwitting customers into trying. The “Stannislav’s Russian Love” was a terrifying, taste bud killing take on what elsewhere would have been called a Cuba libre. It consisted mainly of home-brewed rum -being rum only in name, in fact the source of it was mostly mouldy potatoes that no one else bothered to buy- and it certainly had no lime in. It had something going for it though; it was cheap, and it made people drunk, and it had a hint of mint to it. The Bar was set, and filled with Russian Love. Stanni had his standards well established. To him, taste was overrated, in the end ambience and alcohol were where it’s at, and that was exactly what made Stanni’s remarkably ordinary, and despite popular opinion, successful. The business model, money for drinks and companionship, this age-old habit of the ape descended, had largely remained untouched by the digital revolution.
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A permanent haze of cigarette smoke draped with a hint of sweat, coffee and old dirt swirled around the few words that were being exchanged at this time in the morning and vibrated to the low thrum of the beat. Besides Ruth and Dirk, there were a handful of others present. A group of young men were starting the evening off with a little Russian love and a terribly bad round of pool that seemed to take up the better part of the hour, and threatened a follow-up game. The occasional click of two or more balls striking together, and the more frequent soft thump of the white bouncing off the table walls, kept the quiet alive in a way that mere music never could. At a table in one of the two alcoves sat two women and held a quiet private chat while throwing occasional glances in the general direction of the pool table party, which were sometimes shyly reciprocated.