2 a.m., you walk home. You’ve been drinking but try to maintain that upright bearing, try to maintain that I-will-kick-your-assedness-if-you-so-much-as-come-near-me, potential attacker/whatever person. You hold your car keys like so.

Tonight was too soon to have four beers. You were just getting over a cold, but damn, that country singer was so good, you couldn’t help it and when she sang that sad, sad song, you needed something to pour down that space inside you it opened up.
((Which sounds maudlin. I’m aware.))
So, two a.m., you walk home and you stop by the pizza joint and order and eat a slice alone at their bar. The place is packed, but you have that aura of Don’t Mess and no one bothers you; you think, this is medicinal. This grease: to not feel like shite in the morning. You think: this could be my life, now. Ordering medicinal slices of pizza at two a.m., alone, while drunk. Walking everywhere alone, as you have been, anyway. Which is a thought neither positively- nor negatively-loaded. Only thoughtful, as you watch the antics of Brittney Spears on the Fox News above everyone’s head and scarf that cheese slice down. Just you wait, ‘enry ‘iggins, some part of your brain goes, back to that song your voice teacher had you sing way back when, in high school.
You finish your slice in five minutes and finish the walk home, sticking to the un-streetlit spots because they feel somehow safer, somehow hidden. You are not the spotlighted solo drunk chick, you are not the caricature of yourself you’d never care to see; you are stealth. You are the watcher. And in another minute, you are home. To shower. To bed. To another night gone.