By: Bruce Levine

I accept who I am – I’m an empty bottle. Is that a metaphor for my life? I ask myself.

            I’d just poured two glasses of wine for dinner and finished the bottle and, as I threw the bottle in the trash, I simply said – I accept who I am – I’m an empty bottle.

            Why did I say that? Is there some hidden meaning? Am I seeking something beyond the surface or am I simply looking internally?

            What if I look too hard? What if I don’t like what I find?

            Wouldn’t it be better to throw away the bottle and not think about it? Not look back…

            Look back at what? It’s an empty bottle. Why am I making such a big deal about an empty wine bottle?

            Time to reflect not so much about the statement, but why I’m making the statement.

            Okay.

            A pause.

            Nothing.

            A longer pause.

            A realization that there must be some reason why I made the statement… Some reason for thinking of myself as an empty wine bottle…

            An even longer pause.

            Another realization.

            Acceptance.

            I said it because it fell out of my mouth. I must have thought it was funny at the moment – WRONG! It wasn’t funny and had no hidden meaning.

            It was simply as full of meaning as the bottle of wine – empty.

            I feel better.

            I think I’ll open another bottle of wine.

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Bruce Levine is a Pushcart Prize Poetry nominee, a Spillwords Press Awards winner and a Featured Writer in WestWard Quarterly. Over three hundred of his works are published on over twenty-five on-line journals including Ariel Chart, Spillwords, Literary Yard; in over seventy print books including Tipton Poetry Journal, Halcyon Days and Founder’s Favourites and his shows have been produced in New York and around the country.