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.
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