The Wake

Does anyone else feel as helpless as I do? Are there any other lost souls out there lighting matches into the wind and wondering what the fuck we are doing here? Does anyone else feel as if happy hour is actually the least happy hour of the day? Or am I the only one left?

Sometimes, late at night I open all the windows in my room and let the ice and air wash over me, to create a balance between the outer and inner, some lukewarm equilibrium of feelings.

I have dreams these days where awful things happen and I am framed for them, sneered at like Mussolini, and then thrown in some dank and dingy cell in some subterranean dungeon of my own choosing. They are my dreams, so what does that say about me? When I wake up from these little cognitive adventures I dress and then ever so often muster up the courage to go to class. I used to think that I was a unique and soulful character, that my melancholy was one of a kind. But that is what everyone wants to think. We all believe our lives to either be some brooding tragedy or the greatest epic of all time, or both. I walk from one lecture to the next shuffling between hordes of unhappy or ignorantly blissful students and I wonder whether or not they remember how to whistle, or if they know the feeling of heavy fishing net sliding between their fingers. The tiny perfections of the world are what peak my curiosity. Without them I would be a mollusk just waiting to be boiled down and gutted. But we can still pretend, we can still bask in the idea that our lives are big and epic and wonderful however dishonest it may be. Perhaps this is the key.

Flash Number 1: In which things are brought to the table and first shimmering introductions are made.

She had me on the floor in St. Petersburg on Thursday evening. Jesus-heaven I was awful that night. The musky smell of whiskey and boredom hanging off me like stale deodorant. The feeling of buttermilk between my fingers on everything I touched. Gracie is fastened around me, her legs wrapped into mine like some flesh pretzel one half baked the other still soft. Her breast has fallen out of the top of her nightgown or maybe we had left it that way. Who’s to say? My cigarettes lay with the rest of my life scattered about on top of that awful hotel carpetingcheckered pattern smelling of baking soda and adultery. They neutralize each other nowadays. Who would have known? Perhaps Arm and Hammer will sit in my back pockets now, fairy dust of the 21st century.

I tried to remember how Gracie had ended up in my hotel room.

I tried to remember why I still had a hotel room two days after my flight was scheduled to return to the Midwest.

Why was I still in St. Petersburg?

I realized this wasn’t my hotel room.

Suddenly my mind wakes up a little bit more and more pressing issues are brought to the forefront.

Who the fuck is Gracie?

Where in the hell is Laura?

My feet are dirty as sin. Snow is falling heavily again. Gracie shifts in her sleep and I make my move.

Put on pants.

Button shirt.

Stuff tie into pocket.

Flush socks down toilet.

Socks clog toilet with condom and cigarette butts.

Pace quickens.

GRAB KEYS

GRAB JACKET

slip shoe after shoe onto filthy stems.

Look at scotch bottle.

Recognize its antihero reputation.

Look at scotch bottle

Become secretly impressed.

Take scotch bottle.

Close Curtain.

Intermission.