It was time. Sometimes it took months. Others it was years. This time it was two years. Not bad all things considered.
It would start to come over him, not quite a wave, more a small itch. Despite all his experience, he would ignore the first signs. When he stopped to think about it, it was fear of change that stopped him. He only stopped to think about it after the fact; a fatal flaw he hadn’t yet managed to fix.
By the time he noticed it was too late. He’d be spending his nights in dark bars drinking bourbon and lamenting to Mick or Pete or Ben how “it would be nice to catch the top of the wave a little more often, rather than being stuck waiting for it to crash on me.”
He loved the idea of adventure and travel and new places, but he also yearned to find a place that could hold his spirit for an extended period of time. The idea of change scared him, even though he’d moved enough to know he would thrive wherever he landed.
On those nights when the bourbon burned his throat, he wondered if his restless spirit would ever settle. It felt cliché to think it, but he always felt like his soul was untamable, which wasn’t how he would have described himself, but there it was.
These thoughts came in the third or fourth week of nights in the bar. Not far behind was the nostalgic sadness of the bridges he’d burned on his ways out of other cities. The emptiness inside him would ache and he’d try to fill it and salve it with more bourbon, to little effect.
He would wake the next morning, head aching, lace his sneakers, load the car and run.
