Unearthing Hurt

For Ian

The lights dimmed, the surrounding noise followed suit, leasing shadows time among elbows, glass reflections, and haze smoke circulating.
"I'll tell you, I'll say it all...doesn't mean a damn really. Here, toast me to it--the story."
Mugs clinked, fluid sloshed, the bartender without a bra settled against the bar pretending to stare at a speck on the wall.
"It went down like this: two stupid people lost sight of the end of a tunnel."
There was a long pause which called for some serious endurance, and I sipped my beer a couple of times.
"And?"
"That's it Mate. That is the story in the concentrated form."
I watched the bartender walk away, noticeably let-down and bored from the summation of the story, and when she was out of earshot I whispered to my companion the horrible, the almost evil truth.
"LIfe was inverted for me, for our situation, and someone would die, no doubt, soon, if a drastic change didn't happen."
I let that sit inside of background noise, swallows, taps of a cigarette on the ashtray.
Finally, he straightened up and asked, or noted, "So...you are saying that by leaving her and the kids...just up and abandoning them...you saved a life, or their lives?"
My cigarette smoke swirled slowly around my hand, shifting away as I reached for the mug, and then dispersed as I snubbed the butt out. I drank the remaining contents of the mug.
I turned to my companion, locking on his eyes.
"Yes. Someone would have died if I didn't split the scene. It was truly a matter of life and death."
I threw down some bills and we left the bar with the heaviness of my past expressed out loud hovering between us.