Writing You Only Submit Drunk – Kellan Jansen

June 18, 2026

Mesmerized by the lights in the rain, he broke across the tracks, past the unhoused woman who shouted, “Girl, you can do better!” to his girlfriend, who did not acknowledge the weight of it. They were headed to the bar, where they would get drunk enough to discuss other topics.

Still, it sank like a stone in him. That a random woman on the street would think him unfit to be walking beside her, the woman he had spent five years living with. And there was his boss, who had seen them once on the street, wide-eyed, unsure. Was that really his girl? He had caught it in her expression, the husband smoothing it over, until the bar called again and the liquor flowed.

It’s a strange thing, he thinks. To be in love and living with a woman who could do many times better. He felt ugly. Disgusting. He drank and ate, chasing the warmth and ignoring the cost as it accumulated.

Of course she left, eventually. But there were several years of knowing she would. Several years of a partnership that both knew would eventually fail. He was not her match in appearance. Not in social ease. Not in life.

What a strange thing, he thinks, walking into the bar, alone.
Remembering the man he used to see on the streets at sixteen — drunk, old, alone, and the boy’s idle wondering at how a person ended up that way.

A man must have something, he thought, drinking that night. Something the eye stops on. And he turned himself over and found nothing it would stop on — not the face, not the money, not the easy talk. Only the things he believed he had to offer, which no one had ever asked to see. He felt pathetic thinking it, but it was true for a while.

Every day, the public looked past him. Every day, he imagines the value going unnoticed, unseen, ignored. And the girlfriend left, and the apps offered nothing, and the life grew bland.

He blames the media. But it’s human nature. The eye goes to what is rare and turns from what is worn. Nothing wrong with that, he thinks. Only what nature leaves behind in me.

In the bar that night, the old man came again. He was slouched at the counter, sipping vodka, visibly drunk and in love with the warmth of the night, while the electronic music blasted and the young and beautiful moved through the room.

He said, “You again?”
He said, “Me again.”

And they spoke of nothing in particular. It was a good night, and the liquor warmed their bellies, and it was nice to watch the young find each other.

That is the strange thing, one of them said. The drink that changes your impression of things. The drink that makes you whole again. Together with the man who, the next morning, looked at the ground as you passed him on the way to work. Never caught his name.

He has not seen the man again, but thinks of him sometimes. To be alone in a flowering world. To be drunk, and pass the days in order to be drunk again. And why should the feeling come only by those means?

He takes up meditation and prayer. Having already experienced and lost the pinnacle of his earthly desire. He becomes, through breath, only briefly, one mind in a larger mind-space.

He watches this mind ask and hurry to answer.
There is an inability in him, he sees, to allow the painful to be.
What does it actually do? He sees,
But what I do because of it?

Still, he watches this mind project the danger of hurt onto the media. Onto social media. On to the trend-setters who are born beautiful and shape the world toward carnal nothingness through their acceptance of what was gifted to them.

This is one mind in the mind-space speaking what it has seen.

And when the body goes, that mind will return to the bigger place, which exists all around the man who was once mesmerized by the lights. Who is watching himself solve the lights, which are pretty things, for as long as they flicker.