All our lives

Chapter 1

A random bar. A random hotel. A random city. Random people around him. From all those statements only the last one was true and only partially. There was nothing random and nothing left to chance on a tour. Not for his band. Not for the last 25 years, at least.

So it was not a random bar. It was the bar at the hotel he had given his approval for, in Dublin, a city that had won not only his okay for a show, but for two. The first one had ended a couple of hours ago and instead of being hauled to the airport to embark the plane for the next stop, he had been hauled back to the hotel, to this bar by his colleagues. David, especially, insisted and now he was nowhere to be seen.

"Typical!" Jon thought and took a swig of whiskey from his glass. He roamed the room with a slow glance, before he turned to his now almost empty glass. People, crew, tourists, and locals alike, sitting at their tables or at the bar like him, talking and laughing a little too loud to cover the music that was anything but ambiental. A bunch of beautiful young women that were there because the band was there.

The era of groupies might have passed, but temptation and opportunities were still at hand. He was surrounded by smiles and promises, yet all he could feel was void. An insidious void that had captured everything outside him, but hadn't made the final step and engulfed him entirely already. A void that had him trapped. Like in a dream, a lucid dream. He was painfully aware of who he was, and where he was, and what he was doing, and what others were doing, he was far from being detached from reality, but at the same time, there was a shadow of surrealness coating everything.

Maybe it was normal when you lived with a ghost to become one yourself. He had learned how to mimic everything - joy, excitement, worry, happiness, nervousness, interest - and how to hide the only thing that didn't need to act. Pain. Most of the days he could pass for a normal human being. On some days he could fool even himself that things had gotten not necessarily back to what they were, but to a new kind of normal. And then there were days, clouded and gloomy like this one, when nothing made sense and every breath was a struggle.

Only two weeks into this second leg of the tour and he already felt exhausted. Why in the world had he thought Europe would be better than America? It was not even the same. It was way, way worse. Because America was home, but Europe was the land of past dreams and hopes that had all ended up in ashes. Places he had known through stardust covered lenses had lost their magic. The deception filter was applied to everything around him now.

"Hey, life of the party!"

A hand landed on his back and Dave popped from nowhere on his left side, with his signature smirk in place.

"What party?" he asked, taking the last sip from the glass. He gestured to the bartender for one more. He didn't like it particularly, but he hoped it would numb him enough to catch a good sleep. He needed one.

"More like what life. What's with the face?"

"Tired."

"We are all tired, but you're the only one attending a funeral."

"Can't you just bang some chick and leave me alone?" Jon barked and he realized a second too late that aggressiveness, even one masked by sarcasm, was not a proper reaction. Not when it came to David who didn't actually need to be told what Jon's problem was. Not if he didn't want to start the discussion that had been postponed for far too long.

"Oh, wow! How times change..." he noticed amusedly.

David was clearly in a better mood than he was. Sometimes he envied his friend's capacity of detaching from the blackness of reality.

"Indeed," he cut him off sharply, because it would have been weird to just say he's sorry for his bitchy comment. That would have alerted Dave in a nanosecond. "A few years ago you would have said you've already done it. Twice!" He continued.