The streets are full and the sun is up, so we stay inside. We stay inside and hide from everyone we don’t want to be seen by, and stay around the ones that we would let see us just so we could have an opportunity to see them honestly.

It’s a five drink minimum here. Honesty isn’t natural and it’s laughable to defend the belief that that’s done more good than harm. I say it now, before I pay my entrance fee, because I can still keep a straight face, but I know it’ll probably come up again when I’m laughing so thin and so often that it will be camouflaged, and no one will understand the demeanor with which it was said.

I grab a glass and a shaker. More important than mixing a drink well is cleaning everything before I begin; the last thing I want to be reminded of while preparing to down my elixir of honesty is the last time I did.

It’s a five drink minimum, anything less and you’ve just cheated yourself out of the trip, like marching across Europe only to stop, turn around, and walk back when you’ve hit the borders of France. One down, and it tasted good enough to want a second; I’ll make this one a double. It glides across the tongue, burning, and then warming, and then down, so you will want another to chase it. It’s like smoking a cigar, the best taste is when it’s in your mouth; when it’s done, the taste is vile, and you don’t have more cigar to overpower it with. Three down, two to go. The last was great, wash out the mixer, make another double. Even with the same ingredients, you don’t want to remember what you’ve done, what you’re aiming to do, or all of the times that this has happened exactly the same way. This must have happened exactly the same way, a hundred times before.

Take five, and even the most timid man can overcome his fears enough to tell God what he thinks of the part he plays in His master plan. God gave me wings fashioned to let me fly, but never too high, and never too close. It’s easier to maintain a monopoly of the heavens when you let man believe that he is free to fly, but never to the extent that the heights can impede His rule.

Too many more than five, and I find I lose the ability to feel. I was in the middle of telling God what I thought, only to feel the pen being pulled from my hand, being pulled from my throat, as those around me pinned me against the kitchen floor and stopped me from acting on my God-given right to blaspheme. I went too high, and my wings had been tactically dismantled. This must be what it felt like to try to jump the throne, only to have found—even with two to one numbers—you failed to jump high enough.

I’m still being held down, and I say something about the view through my thin and constant laughs, but no one is laughing thin and constant with me.

What I don’t feel is being held down. I am just on the floor, spread in my own tragic, spread-armed snow angel, with a magnetic attraction that won’t allow me to move more. I’m sure that someone is trying to tell me something in all of this, but no one will listen after being interrupted, so I stay down and laugh about the ironic futility of struggle. I laugh, thin and constant, until it sounds like a mob around a crucifixion, because everyone knows it’s honest, so they leave me to write to God if I want.

The room begins to swim around me, but no matter how close I get to the floor, I can’t seem to drown myself. I can’t drown myself, so I get up. I’m on all fours with my eyes closed. Open my eyes, and pull myself the rest of the way up. I can’t think, I can’t form, I can’t be honest like this, but I can perceive. My train of thought has been derailed, and I’m searching over every inch of faux-wood counter top for a bit of track to start back on. I look out the window and I see a girl smoking hard. Smoking like drunken people kiss. The lushes: those who know they will regret, or be regretted, in the morning, but now is not the morning, and now we’re being honest. With each and every drag she takes I can feel the emotion and want being pulled into her along with the burning air, under such force, that the filter is made as obsolete as whatever the surgeon general is preaching to people who never wanted to live past their mid-life crisis in the first place.

I don’t know why. I honestly never want to, or think to ask, but she is the emotion that drove whatever chaos Nietzsche told me about to create. She is the ironic mother/artist in a universe of apathetic entropy. The chance coincidence that, when everything is torn down so quickly, doesn’t notice the trash heap it throws lives into is a creation twice as beautiful as any building the pieces come from.

I watch, and want, just as strongly as she does, to make something by chance and destruction, and to drag all the pain through, and breathe it in, with a control that it could never have in a filter.

I retreat to a cold room in the basement, where time is lost, in a space without windows, and an un-setting fluorescent sun. I go down with one hand grasping the only friend I know that can aid me in getting closer to God than my melted wings of wax and feathers would allow. I go down to my timeless dungeon, to fly.

Like waking up next to anyone after a night like that,

it was rightfully as cold and as hard as any reception I would have expected, and as cold and as hard as any reception I would have deserved. The only good thing in a morning like this is that I have nothing to stay down for, not here, not like this. It's not a matter of having reason to get up, but it's not for me to make myself a resident in an un-wanting bed. I move to push myself up, and the blood rushes to my head and all the colors drain and go inverted, forcing me to close my eyes and brace against a wall to regain my equilibrium.

I hold myself as stiff as a corpse and wait until God stops spinning the scenery in front of me, like a matador waving a muleta. Life is already streaming down my flanks, and I won’t give him the shrill and instant pleasure of driving the sword between my shoulders yet, now is my turn to make him look like a fool in front of the crowds with a beast that won’t bite and won’t bow. The plight we face: we can’t win in a fight, and we can’t be ourselves while being subservient, so we gaze in angst and infinite frustration, knowing that the blade will come down eventually, the deck was stacked against us before we knew we were even playing the game. Everything begins to still, and I make my way out of the room in the motionless tranquility that follows.

My only consolation is that I'm awake before any one else is, the only severance package that I got from months of whole-hearted labor in my "off-months" seems to be the deeply engrained reaction in my circadian rhythm that springs me to whatever degree of life I can muster so that I can dutifully drain my soul for whoever will pay me. I know that it sounds like the work of a whore, but what else can you call it when you sell your well being to do something you despise so that you can grab at something a bit wider when you go to pay a bill. I want to talk about the self-respect of walking around with enough money to hold myself up, but I don't have enough respect for what I do to talk about it when we get home at night without feeling a gag-reflex kick in, accompanied—in full—by the taste of stomach acid and whatever it took to keep the day down in the first place.

I know I have to be someplace, so leaving doesn't require any debate. I take a minute to freshen my breath to the point of managing to keep up a presentable facade and take a swig of the mouth-wash I find under the sink. I spit into the sink and catch a glimpse my hands holding me up above the porcelain, and I chuckle quietly as I remember a tête-à-tête I'd had with a friend shortly after I'd come back to enjoy some time away from school. I had been mulling over how removed I was from my former self and said, in the closest thing I could sustain to a resolute tone, "I've decided that no matter how far I fall, or how much debauchery I partake in, I have drawn a line in the sand, and I won't sell my soul." Without missing a beat, and before my mouth had even closed, my friend told me that I shouldn't draw my lines so close to the water, lest the waves wash them away.

I've had enough self-reflection to grant me a reprieve from the mirror, which I’d been avoiding since our encounter that night. I don't even question where things have gone wrong, the waves came, and the sand had resettled. It all seems to be like the lady mantis to me. Once I hit a peak, and my mind and body are caught in a heated battle where my mind appeals to my better nature to run while I still have something worth running for, and my body wants to soak in every minute, she strikes. When I hit that majestically pivotal stall point, she turns around and bites off my head, and now the debate is tragically one sided; the waves came, and the sand had resettled. With my id at the wheel all I can do is try to piece together the still frames that my mind’s shutter will snap of the plummeting night, into a Picasso of a cluster fucked memory that would mean everything if I were the artist and not the viewer.

My shirt is in a ball next to a bed in a dark room that smells like mistakes. There’s someone in there sleeping peacefully, but I don’t know who, and I’m not going to find out; I can’t remember, and I don’t want to remember, so I run my head and arms through their respective holes in the fabric and walk out on carpeting that cloaks my footsteps. They might not remember me, and if we all walk away, maybe we can pretend Berkeley was right.

I am controlled enough at this point to get in the car and get out. I wouldn’t normally be up for seeing someone on such a quick turn, but I’ll be getting an upper out of it, and if I can just stall for long enough for that to kick in, then this charade will have worked like so many before it.

I get to the café first, which gives me time to order and start taking the caffeine in large enough doses to finish a cup before my friend arrives. I dispose of the proof that I’d had a cup before she got there, and buy another round. I always buy when I go to coffee with someone else, because it’s a five dollar therapy session where I don’t have to tell myself I’m in therapy, and they know that—for the price of jumping around with me and my streaming mind for a few hours—they get a free drink. So we drink away the afternoon.

I try to keep the conversation on a level, I’d made promises about not passing out, and I knew how to not incriminate myself, but when I get talking it becomes harder and harder to temper my conversation jumps.

“You think that was bad? Well last night I…” This is where I see what I’m made of. I don’t even have time to notice I made a mistake; I just feel it, and take a route back to safety. “… I boxed until I could almost see bone.” The knuckles are proof, and it wasn’t a lie, but it sure as hell doesn’t bury me like the truth. I make some witty remark about how I’m destined to die young to disprove the belief that only the good do, and to save myself from age. She never knows what to say to those quips, and I’ve worked hard to make sure of the fact. The boy who cried wolf is an attack strategy if you use it correctly, and I am always on the offensive.

I notice that the conversations are eating each other. We don’t even spark anymore, we just argue over what was said in the past, when things were fresh and there was something to say, but now we are the burning embers in an ocean of ash. I know this feeling, but I don’t know how to outrun it. I know that it’s a stall and that a retort is coming when I can’t climb any longer. I’ve worked myself on the offensive so long I didn’t see the clouds forming behind me. I try to keep up the race, but it’s no use, and I’m locked in a trap.

The words anyone like me hates to hear: worry, concern, care. They all roll together into what I know is nothing short of an impromptu intervention. I know how to play it off, sink it in under the surface so they can’t see it running off before it gets past the layers they hoped to penetrate. I can pretend as well as I can be honest, and who’s to say which is better or more real.

It was a good run, the coffee cups are empty and we both have places to be. I promise that I’ll get better, and half mean it too. The mind has recovered, and the lady mantis is no where in sight; the tempest has subsided, and it’s time to redraw the superficial lines. So I think, and I draw, and I breathe deep. I drive slowly home, and shower until I’m red, and brush my teeth until I can’t feel the bristles anymore over the numbed surface of my mouth. I’ve made a full recovery and it’s time to leave my past and face my future. Without debauchery to keep my hands from going idle, I’m left flipping through the pages of whichever Hemmingway I left by my chair and hoping to hear about something better. Then a friend calls and tells me that his home is free that night. This time the mantis won’t get me; it never has in the past, and I won’t let it this time, I have lines in the sand that will stop me if things go to far, lines that I would wager my soul upon.

I woke up on the floor again

I don't know where, and I haven't been back long enough to command myself to remember why. I haven't opened my eyes yet. It isn't that I hold them shut, but that I can't focus my muscles to accomplish something as exact and important as lifting an eyelid. I finally get so far as to realize that I'm awake. My dream has been shattered like a plate glass window pane after being struck with a ball pin hammer; holding still in front of me with the same expression, and as I realize what happened—the faults already formed across it—and try to rush to and hold the nearest character of my evasive subconscious not only together, but—for the last seconds of its existence—close, it all starts falling in large pieces to the floor, hitting the ground with such force and resentment that it breaks into sand so fine that I could never fit the puzzle back together; and I am left without a piece large enough to use in violence and indulgent malice against myself so that I might be able to join the sand on the floor forever.

I realize what I've lost, and in my blind pain on the floor, I kick out, hoping to hit something that will rid my mind of doubt that I am, and will forever be, jailed in this dark isolation without a sense of time or feeling. I hit a bottle, and it makes a lulling, grinding hum across what I decide must be tile. I try my best to focus on the only thing I know is happening, the slow warping roll of the glass over the burnt clay and sediment, and rejoice with pride in my slowly recuperating mental acuity, as I conclude that it must have been the rum that I nudged (as the scotch, tequila, and gin all came in square based bottles, and the vodka was in a plastic bottle that looked as though it had been fashioned to double as a hip flask. The whiskey was in a round bottle, but—despite my respect for the works it had contributed to with those such as Bukowski, who couldn't go a two paged chapter without giving it its due credit and writing it in with a lonely glass and some cubes of ice—I wasn't going to be caught dead near the stuff, and somewhere in me, I still held that alive was something better for me, for now, than dead.)

My foray into the memory of my liquid compatriots pulls me into a fit of violent coughs, and I realize that I had to actively remind myself to breathe, and—with this knowledge—I lose any undue sense of pompous pride that swelled when I could decipher what object I kicked moments earlier. As my lungs reacted as a natural pendulum, I gasped back in, to fill the void in my chest and took a second to analyze the smell of the exhalation an instant earlier. The sour perfume of alcohol and gastric acid had drifted back to me, and I coughed back violently again, as the pendulum returned.

I continue this shifting of respiratory extremities, interspersed with chokes and gags until I force myself to pause. I lay here with my eyes shut soft and my body contorted across the floor into what I imagine the chalk outline of a person who fell to his death would fit into—like a peg falling into the perfect hole—and I hold my breath like the longer it is in me, the less it would fight to leave. I open my mouth and let out a shaky stream of wind, fighting off every urge to let it flow from me freely. I push all I can from my chest, I stop, and then force myself to slowly draw back in until I'm full; as though I were taking the air in shots until the bottle is empty and I feel like I'll throw the air up again.

I focus on this task—as I inwardly hope, by now, that my heart can pump on its own, because I can only force myself to do this right now, and I don't think I have the focus in me to function a machine so complex. Noting my mind has wandered left of my lungs, I am over-run by a silent wave of panic, and rush back to my breathing, which—much to my surprise—has leveled to something much more calm, and even without my constant vigilance.

With this hurdle behind me, I decide that it's time to confront reality and lift my eyelids to face what is in front of me. I do this, and the mass of light and shapes is what I know to be the precipice of reality. I close my eyes immediately, tightly, thinking that, if this is what God wants me to live in, I'll spend an eternity piecing together the sands of my dream, and breathing life into the grains as I must have done the night prior, because if God can do it then I can. I look around the back of my eyelids in a futile agony, as the momentary inverted blink must have blown away the sand to chain me away from further blasphemy, and what was left was a mocking, derisory still-frame burned into my eyes and projected in purple and pink across the skin in front of them.

My arms are cold, my body is cold, my feet are cold, but my legs are warm, and this gives me a momentary reassurance that—if nothing else—I kept my pants on all the way through the night, and through to winding up wherever I am. I can't really feel my hands, but I'm aware when I move the muscles, and that's what I'm used to by now. I know where the ball pin hammer hit my dream; because it has left its entrance wound on a part of my skull that cries for justice.

I groan a little, because I haven't heard my own voice, and then I face the fact that it is only a climb up a mountain from here, so I might as well make a foothold. I open my eyes again, trying to search for familiarity. I see blood smears and drops on the blue-white tile, which was hardly what I had in mind, but I thought it was probably important to take note of it. I wonder if I'd gotten a pairing knife hickey the night before, but I tell myself that there would be more, and that it would probably be harder to view anything if I had gotten one. I've reasoned that the neck is the body's version of a power conduit, and there aren't many places you can enter in that aren't important to your vital functions. I try to bring myself up from the ground, and slap the floor in front of me with an open hand. I've found my culprit and victim, which brings a sadistic bit of relief over me, while I view my crimson stained hand and the three dime sized holes that the fluid is spawning from across the predominant knuckles. I was boxing. I don't know why, exactly, but it explains why I couldn't pinpoint the hurt. The knuckles never hurt after you open them. They hurt while you're boxing, but they go numb when you don't touch them. How often do you touch your own knuckles? The only time you feel it is when you have someone else touching you, and then boxing makes all the sense in the world as just another way to remind yourself to keep other people's hands away. It only hurts like you wouldn't hurt yourself.

I shake my hand and chuckle a bit; I pull my other hand up and drag myself through the doorway that was by my feet. I give another push to the bottle as I pass it, because I haven't heard its gentle hum for a while, but this time the grind is loud and strained, like you might imagine a tank would be, when pivoting its turret to stare you in the eye. I accept this new found animosity, because I didn't know what I'd done to deserve it, but I know that I couldn't say that I knew I didn't deserve it. I drag a few feet further, and pull myself up.

Now I'm looking at myself face to face. A feeling that should send any man to shame, but I feel better in this state, because I know that what's staring back at me can't comment on my state of affairs. My soul matches my skin, and he can't rage on about the mask. I look over my torso, trying to get clues as to what happened, but I only have a few more questions. A row of dots runs down either side of my neck, like measurements on a treasure map to the where x marks whatever spot I should find, to an indentation of a man paused in the making of a tragic snow angel a short distance below my left pec. I look up, and let out another chuckle. This time because I know the blood on my hands didn't remind me worth a damn. It looked as though someone had tried to take the pound of flesh out of my chest with their hands and had been a retreat, by their prey, to a tile bed, away from doing so. I laugh, because I failed, and that's a better reason to laugh, and a better reason to try to do something you won't succeed at, than honor or victory could ever be in this moment.

I stare into the mirror, and look at my eyes, just stare into them, like if I were to continue and look long enough the other side might tell me a secret about how to get out and run away into the next cold floor wake up. I look at the scars and try to tell myself that this is beauty, that there is beauty in the destruction of what I didn't love, and that that was better than tolerating of what I couldn't, and I look into the eyes and tell myself that hate is a reasonable substitute for love, because they both fill the same void, the same want for a higher emotion, a passion of striving. I look in, and know that it's all bullshit, because I have all the love inside of me to not want to destroy the things around me, because they are beautiful before I bend and mold them. I know it's bullshit, and I have all of this higher passion and emotion in me, waiting and willing to strive, that has no out, no target, and so it gets set on a back-burner staying primed and wanting while it's bastard cousin comes out to play, because that I can use as freely and as accurately as any appendage, and it's so much easier than trying to learn something newer.

Something is in my eye, and it's making staring down glass a pain, I wipe it out a few times, and then fall to my knees asking forgiveness and having my words chased and burned from my mouth. I fall down, and my head hits like a hardboiled egg on a rock.