There’s an empty bottle of whisky on my desk. It’s been there 10 years now, maybe a little bit more. Longer than the desk, in any case. Longer than any of the furniture in the room.

Johnnie Walker. Red label. Old enough to be measured in fluid ozs and percentage proofs.

I don’t drink whisky and never really have. I don’t drink at all these days. I assume my dad drank all this one and then I kept the bottle for some reason, because it’s nice and old, because it was there, because it gives me something to look at more interesting than the wall.

We got it fifteen, twenty years ago from the cupboards of a neighbour’s house after she’d died and we were helping clean up, this and various other archaic bottles of unopened spirits. I have no idea where they went, or what they were.

Shamefully, I don’t even remember her name. Maybe I never knew it. I used to talk to her in the mornings while waiting for the bus. She was kind of funny. I think she thought I was odd, weird.

I was odd, weird. I still am. It’s too late to change. Some lack I’ll always have.

I don’t know why I keep it, the bottle. But I couldn’t imagine throwing it away. If I’d left the top off it’d be full of dust by now.

Next to it there’s a milk bottle with a feather in it. No memories attach themselves to those.

__________

Notes:

1. Written on the 17th July, 2022

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