So... smug? I'd say smug, but its something else.

I've been in a rut, but today I finally wrote something that I feel captures a tone that I want. Its stupid to say this, but there's always this exact tone and feel to a piece that I can never quite capture. Well, i got it for a page today.

Chocolate stains lined the corners of her lips. She licked her thumb and index finger before clearing the residue. "I never had any pets" she said while cleaning the desert from her lips. Her expression never changed and her eyes didn't meet mine as she broke the silence. "Never, not a cat, not a dog, so i don't know how it feels to lose one," she continued still with an air of calm, not like she felt anything in her words, merely stating the facts. "Other kids learn the lesson of in this way I guess. Flushing a goldfish down a toilet, having to bury their cat that they spent their adolescence with, understand what it means to age as their dogs got pains in their joints, that their pet walked with a limp or stopped waling all together. I don't think that others take these expressions for granted. I just don't know how it would feel to experience them" She stopped talking when the waiter came to take away her plate and empty the ash trays. "Two espressos please," she said looking at the waiter, then sliding her eyes from him to me she smiled a small and unreadable smile before continuing, "And how should I feel? I feel like I'm missing something, something everyone else has, a relationship to aging, death, evanescent companionship, compressed into adolescence, when we are most susceptible to those experiences. Sure, I've had friends who have died, friends who are old, but I feel like their deaths or their age are unaccessible to me, I feel an emptiness when I think of their passing. Not an emptiness left by their absence, but an emptiness where there should be mourning or empathy." She pauses when the coffees arrive, she lights a Dunhill and lets the smoke roll off her tongue as she exhales the first drag. When I realized she was finished, I light up my own cigarette, Lucky Strike, and feeling it was my turn to say something found myself saying "And?" with little to no conviction. "And. And thats it. You got the bill?"

Well its done.
I don't know where to take it from there, but i wish I could write a whole story in that tone, that feeling, even then its not finished. I had a couple friends read it, and they get it, they also get that the writer (me) is an asshole. Its not the intention to be an asshole, I tried to find the right adjective for so long to replace the work conviction. But thats it, its not about who is an asshole (call me that if you'd like), its about some things being irreconcilable, especially after desert over a coffee. So you ask when else might we say it? After a drink? and what drunks listen to another drunk with too many proverbs. In bed after sex? Talk about no second date. Call me a cynic, whatever, most lives aren't idyllic, and if they were, are you always truthful? Anyways, I'm not going to keep defending myself, I hear its one of my bigger faults, always explaining myself before I give a punch. No, back on target, really, why not say it after desert? We're alone, our little things we've pieced together for ourselves are solitary, break dead air with something sincere, even if they don't listen and believe in it, will you in a year? Whether you do or don't thats the world we live in, little pieces, we feel, we regret, we recognize, and for what? We share it with a crowd of sympathetics, is there anything more patronizing than a pat on the back? How do you want them to respond? If they get it, do you expect a "oh do, please tell me more," or "oh thats so sad," what? If I write more here its preachy so I quit it and hope that you get it after extensive subtext (this being the sub). I don't think I'm defending myself. It may sound like a defense, but really, its because I don't know how to say all of that in a story by only saying "And?"

I read this today when I was a bit more sober and that last paragraph makes no sense. I almost like how little sense it makes so I'm not editing it.