melancholy

Melancholy

he had been feeling miserable for weeks, his fiancé had left him and taken their dogs along she went home to live with her elderly father every day was a bother, going to town to open the café, serving kids burgers and coke until five o’clock, cleaning the place as he had no staff walking home watching TV and drinking beer until he fell asleep waking up a hundred times
One morning he didn’t open his café took a train out of town and wanted to go to a farm where he had lived for a few years and been happy, the farm had shifted hands the owner said his widow and her sister up a hill they were glad to see him but asked if he was well
later on, he walked to another farm to visit two
brothers he had gone to school with, one of them had moved out, and the youngest one had taken over the farm they too asked if he was feeling ok since it was planting time, they were busy but would visit him in the evening at the widow’s house and they watched him when he walked across the landscape following a path he knew so, sensed he was not welcomed
behind boulders out of sight, he drank from a flask and suddenly he cried his loneliness was acute, he had failed somehow now he only had himself, and no one was going to help him out of his self-inflicted quagmire of self-hate, at the widow's house, his sister was waiting, she took his bottle away and said, no more of this and drove him home