To the man I met at the bar that cold evening,
I dreamt about you. I can't remember the details, just that we kept on merging into one another. Becoming one person and then splitting apart, over and over again. It sounds bizarre when I try to put it into words, but in the dream, I would look down at my hands, and they would be your hands. I'd speak and hear your voice coming from my throat. Then suddenly I'd be looking at myself through your eyes, feeling what you felt, thinking your thoughts as if they were my own. We kept flowing back and forth like that, boundaries disappearing and reforming, until I couldn't tell where I ended and you began.
The weird part is how natural it felt in the moment. There was no panic, no sense that something was wrong. It was like we were two streams meeting and becoming a river, then branching off again into separate channels, only to merge once more downstream. Even now, hours later, I can still feel the echo of it, this strange intimacy of being inside someone else's skin, of knowing exactly how it feels to be you.
I've been thinking about it all day, trying to remember more details, but they keep slipping through my fingers like water. Memory, I have come to know, is a temperamental lover, sliding between reality and imagination like a pleated ocean with its pattern of water waves. The night we met wasn't extraordinary by any conventional measure. It was just another rain-soaked evening in a city that collects stories like dust in harmattan. But something about you refused to dissolve with the morning fog. Something about you chose to stay.
I remember You entering like a thunderstorm, water cascading from your suit in rivulets. Raindrops clinging to your eyelashes, your lips quivering from the cold. Each step left a small constellation of wet footprints across the bar's worn wooden floor. You loosened your tie as you walked. Your movements were deliberate, as if you were on a stage and you had rehearsed many times before coming. You shed your coat with the casual grace of someone accustomed to transition, water sliding off the fabric like kisses from an ex-lover. Droplets caught the low amber light, momentarily transforming into scattered diamonds.
At the bar, you ordered whiskey. Not a performance, but a ritual. The bartender, with weathered hands and knowing eyes, poured a glass that caught the light like liquid amber. You threw the shot back in one fluid motion, throat working, eyes momentarily closed. When they opened, they were deeper, darker, as if the whiskey had rinsed away some external sins. You had ten more shots and four bottles of beer. The bartender's eyes narrowed. I had seen that look before, the universal expression of someone calculating whether to intervene or wait for trouble to announce itself more clearly. Then you turned and your bloodshot eyes locked onto mine. Recognition flooded your face, though I was certain I had never seen you before. You took one stumbling step forward, then another, each foot falling heavy and uncertain—the distance between us, shrinking with alarming speed.
‘You!’ You said, pointing a finger that couldn't quite stay steady. ‘You look just like him.’ Your breath was a cocktail of whiskey, beer and regret. ‘Just like him, likeeee Kwame…’
And then you saw it, the painting. Van Gogh's Starry Night. That swirling universe of blues and yellows, where reality bends and emotion takes physical form. The painting vibrated with its own internal storm, not like the others in the bar. Our eyes met. Reflected in the glass, against Van Gogh's mad, beautiful sky. Your eyes were what carried me to slumber that night. Brown and sometimes golden. You walked towards me and stretched your hands. I remembered your hands first. Not in a romantic sense, but in the way an artist might notice another's hands, capable, with a hint of restlessness. They moved when you spoke, translating your drunken gibberish into invisible gestures. You rambled about liminality, about existing in the spaces between languages, between moments, between identities.
When our hands touched, I felt the roughness. As if you had been peeling layers of the earth since you came out of your mother. As the night went on, I found out that it wasn't the earth you had been peeling but yourself. You peeled and tore parts of yourself every morning, burying them deep in the earth before you walked out to meet the world. Sometimes you were too tired to dig it back up and wear after work that you slept naked beside it, staring as the darkness swallowed you whole. You've known pain, you've swam in loneliness. You've grown used to the ache. Time has made you numb.
My shirt still carries the ghost of that night. Whiskey, yes, weed yes, but also something more elemental. A mixture of wet wool, old leather, and something I can only describe as potential. The fabric holds the memory of our conversation better than my mind can, which tends to blur the edges, soften the lines.
You grew quiet after a while. I turned to you and asked about God. You looked me dead in the eye and told me God existed in the palms of Kwame. The love of your life. You used was in describing him, I didn't ask why.
You asked me about the scar that ran along my left hand. I told you about the boy I once loved, who married a girl out of fear. How it had broken me so much, I drank too much and rode my motorbike into a wall.
‘Love is stupid, ’ you said, and I nodded. Your fingers traced the swirling blues of Van Gogh's Starry Night as you spoke, voice low and measured.
‘Lavender marriages are like this painting,’ you said. ‘Beautiful from a distance, but chaotic up close. Turbulent underneath.’
You told me about Sarah, your wife, your shield, your unintended accomplice. ‘I didn't marry her out of cruelty,’ you said. ‘I married her out of survival.’ In the 2000s, a man like you had few options. Loving another man could destroy everything: career, reputation, entire existence.
‘Love isn't linear,’ you continued. ‘Look at this painting. Van Gogh understood. Love is a cyclone, not a straight line. My love for her is a brush stroke. Present, but not consuming. My love for men? That's the entire canvas.’
Sarah knew. Not everything, but enough. You had an understanding carved from necessity and mutual protection. She wanted stability; you wanted survival. Your marriage was a carefully constructed architecture of silence and compromise.
‘In Starry Night, every element is in constant motion,’ you said, fingers still hovering near the painting's surface. ‘That's how our marriage feels. Always moving, never truly settling. Never truly still.’ The whiskey between us became a third presence, witnessing, understanding.
‘Other people must be happy; everyone here looks happy.’ I said, and you chuckled.
‘Never confuse a mask for a face. Look around and tell me who is happy here.’
We turned from Van Gogh's swirling madness to the bar's living canvas—each patron a study in quiet desperation.
‘The man in the blue sweater,’ you whispered, ‘middle management written across his forehead like a curse. Divorced twice, probably talks to his mother every Sunday out of obligation, not love. His children despise him. He's probably here thinking he will get a twenty-something-year-old for the night. He won't.’
I pointed to the woman nursing her martini. And he shook his head. ‘Look at her rings.’ He began. ‘Expensive, but worn with a practised indifference. A corporate lawyer who goes home to an empty apartment and a bottle of akpeteshie. Her plants are probably dying, just like her dreams.’
You chuckled, a sound both cruel and tender. ‘The bartender. See how his hands move? Mechanical. Twenty years of pouring other people's escape, never finding his own. Nights blend into mornings, mornings into forgotten afternoons.’
An older man in the corner, nursing a whiskey slower than we were, caught our attention.
‘War veteran,’ you said. ‘Not the heroic type in movies. The kind who came home and forgot how to be human. Marriage survived out of exhaustion, not love.’
‘The young boys over there. Jobless and scared of the future. Probably has like three hungry babies waiting to suckle on trauma and disappointment from the breast of an eighteen-year-old girl who confuses love with abuse.’
You were ruthless in your observations, dissecting lives like clinical pathologists. Each patron became a specimen of modern emptiness, breathing, but not alive. Existing in the spaces between desire and resignation.
‘We're all just waiting,’ you continued, ‘waiting for something to happen. But nothing ever does.’
‘Death,’ I murmured. ‘Death is what we're waiting for.’
The bar hummed with unspoken disappointments, each person a ghost waiting to be noticed. You touched your forehead. It was then that I noticed the tears.
‘I loved him,’ you began. ‘I really did. And now he's gone. And I never got to tell him because I was scared. Now he's dead.’ You shook your head and began to sob. You turned to me suddenly, grabbing my hands, ‘If you're lucky enough to meet someone that you love and he loves you back, tell them. Or you'll end up alone and miserable. Like me, trapped in a prison of your own choosing.’ You walked over to the bartender and slumped into one of the seats. The drinks continued, and you swallowed them all..
***
That night, in the dream, we were a Venn diagram of experience, overlapping, touching, merging. I felt the weight of your unspoken stories, the texture of your unnamed desires.
You asked me to define loneliness, and I told you of that boy I kissed under the moonlight. The one who soaked my heart in a sea of promises and then left. You laughed. ‘That's not loneliness,’ you replied. ‘You will learn that loneliness has coats of many colours and you still haven't seen all the colours.’
You shifted in the dream-space, and I felt your history settling into my bones like sediment. Through our merged consciousness, I experienced Christmas mornings in your house, the kitchen alive with the sound of grandchildren's laughter, the dining table groaning under the weight of too much food, your daughter asking if you need help while already moving toward the next task. Everyone there, everyone loving, everyone busy. And you, standing in the centre of it all, feeling like a ghost at your own gathering.
‘That's one shade of loneliness,’ you said, your voice carrying the weight of decades. ‘Being surrounded by people who love the idea of you but don't have time to know who you actually are anymore. They see Grandpa, Da, the reliable one. They don't see the man who still dreams, who still wants things he can't name at the dinner table.’
I felt the particular ache of being loved in theory, how your son calls every Tuesday like clockwork, asking about your doctor's appointments and your medications, but never about the book you're reading or the thoughts that keep you up at night. How your daughter brings the grandchildren over and immediately starts cleaning your kitchen while they play, as if your loneliness might be solved by having a tidier house.
‘They treat me like a monument to their childhood,’ you continued, and I could taste the bitterness of it. "Something to be maintained and visited, but not something that's still growing, still becoming.’
Then the dream shifted, and I felt your body as if it were mine, the morning stiffness, the way mirrors had become enemies, the clothes that no longer fit the same way. You showed me what it felt like to want touch, to crave intimacy, while living in skin that felt like a betrayal of who you used to be.
‘Your moonlight boy saw potential in you,’ you said.
‘When I look in the mirror, I see expired potential. Everything soft where it used to be firm, everything loose where it once was taut. And the world agrees, I've become invisible to desire. Allergic to beauty.’
You took me through the landscape of dating at sixty-eight, the particular humiliation of it. The men your age on dating apps with their lists: ‘Must be active, energetic, young at heart’—code words meaning they wanted someone who didn't look like they'd lived as long as they had. The way they'd meet you for coffee and their faces would fall slightly, as if you'd lied by existing in the body you actually inhabited.
‘And then there are the young ones,’ you said, your voice turning sharp. ‘They see the house, the car, the financial security, and suddenly they're interested. But when they touch you, you can feel them calculating. Measuring your bank account against your wrinkles, your generosity against your age spots.’
I experienced it through your memories, the twenty-eight-year-old who called you beautiful while his eyes stayed flat and assessing. The way he'd suggest expensive restaurants and let you pay, the way his kisses felt like performances. How you'd catch him checking his phone during conversations, counting the minutes until he could leave, until he'd earned whatever you might give him.
‘The cruellest part,’ you whispered, and our merged consciousness flooded with the weight of unused love, ‘is how much I still have to give. All this tenderness, all this accumulated wisdom about how to love someone well, and nowhere to put it. No one who wants it from these hands, this heart, this body that's been written off as past its prime.’
You showed me the nights you'd lie awake, your body remembering what it felt like to be desired for yourself, not your resources. How you'd reach across the bed out of habit, forgetting there was no one there who chose you for your laugh, your thoughts, the way you made coffee in the morning.
‘Your heartbreak will heal,’ you said, and I felt your certainty like warm water. ‘Mine has just learned to live with itself. That's the difference between young loneliness and old loneliness. Yours still believes in rescue. Mine has made peace with the permanent ache.’
When I got up to bathe, I carried both of our longings with me, your settled sadness and my sharp grief learning from each other in the space between sleep and morning light. The water was cold, the shirt I wore last night, which was on the couch, was just a shirt. The alcohol induced chaos was wearing off. The whiskey smell was fading, but something remained, a residue of connection, of that brief, electric moment when two strangers recognised something in each other that defies explanation. Just another night. Just another dream. Just another story of you and me, two strangers, breathing between the thin lines of survival.
Benjamin Cyril Arthur is a prolific writer who holds a degree in English and linguistics. He is a winner of the 2020 Samira Bawumia Literary Prize Award in Ghana. A participant of the Canex Creative Writing Workshop 2024. His short stories have appeared in Lolwe, Brittle Paper, Flametree Press, Tampered Press, Lunaris Review, Ama Atta Aidoo Centre for Creative Writing, LounLoun, etc. When not writing, Benjamin works as an amateur photographer.