Another Night

             Tonight was another one of those nights, a night filled with drinking enough so that I wouldn’t feel the pain anymore.  A night of poisoning myself to the point that I would not remember a single thing in the morning.  Why did I do this to myself over and over again?  I didn’t want to, and I always hated how I felt the morning after, yet I couldn’t help myself.  I suppose you could call it symptoms of a disease, or even a cry for help.  But that’s not how I saw it.

            The world is a bleak place, one that is growing a shade darker each and every day.  Some days were worse than others, both on a personal scale and on a global one.  These were the days that I found myself at my favourite pub.  I never intend to drink as much as I do, but one turns into two and two turns into ten, then before I know it, I am back at my front door, fumbling through my pockets to find my keys, as I am now.

            I’m a man of habit, I always have been.  Phone always goes in my left pocket, and wallet is always in my right.  My keys normally find my left pocket to be their home, except if I am wearing a jacket, then they sit in my jacket’s left pocket.  I have been this way for as long as I can remember, but I always seem to forget this when I drink, which means whenever I find myself completely inebriated at my front door, I fumble in every pocket for them, becoming increasingly panicked as I do so.

            I find them, as I always do, and proceed to unlock the front door to my silent, empty house.  I close the door and lock myself in, feeling an instant wave of relief and safety as I do so.  As I take a step inside, the room begins to tilt and spin, causing me to lose my balance and stumble into the wall where I hang my keys.  Well, the joke is on the room since I needed to hang them up and turn on the light anyways.  Like I said, I’m a creature of habit.

            I hang my keys as I turn the light on, causing me an instant migraine as the illuminated bulbs blind me.  My hands dash to my poor eyes, hiding them from the brightness until they have time to adjust.  God, my head is killing me now.  I need another drink to make this headache go away; it’s not like I’m going to remember tonight anyways.  After my eyes have adjusted, I remove my hands, seeing them in the light for the first time.  They are covered in dirt, and what looks to be blood.  Did I get into another fight?  I couldn’t recall, but I didn’t feel any pain.  No matter how much I drink, I still feel some pain after a fight, so this was a good sign.

            I walked to my kitchen, wobbling into every wall I could find as I did so.  One of these days I’m going to fall into one of my walls and do some serious damage, but tonight was not that night.  I found myself at the stainless-steel door that kept my nourishment fresh and cool.  I opened it up to be greeted with an aura of cold slowly radiating from the opening.  It felt amazing on my flushed skin.  I always enjoyed the cold when I was drinking, and the coldness from the fridge was no exception.  I reached to the bottom shelf and grabbed one of the many beers I had stored there.  Without a second thought, I smoothly shut the door and cracked the cap off with the bottle opener I had installed there.

            I took a large, satisfying gulp from the amber bottle, letting the smooth, hoppy taste slide down my throat, providing me with instant relief from my splitting headache.  I leaned up against the adjacent wall and slowly slid down it until I was sitting on the hard, cold tile floor.  As I took another swig of beer, I noticed that there were muddy prints on the ground leading from where I was to where I am.  Looks like my dumbass forgot to take my boots off again.  Well, it’s better that I notice that now than in the morning after I wore them to bed.  I’d rather not make that mistake again.

            I slipped my boots off and tossed them to the front entrance.  They landed with a thud, spraying little bits of dirt and debris around their landing site.  Man, they are pretty dirty, I’m pretty dirty; what the hell did I do tonight?

            I pull myself up from the ground and start to walk towards my bathroom.  It’s funny, when I’m drunk, I can’t walk a straight line worth a damn, but when I’m drinking, I’m as steady as a sober priest.  Taking another swig, I entered the bathroom and turned on the light, wondering how messed up I was after tonight.  I was covered it dirt; every inch of skin that was showing was brown and faded.  My hair had clumps of mud entangled in it, and my jacket was thoroughly stained.  I take my jacket off, watching as little clouds of dirt puff off of my shoulders.  Hell, it’s so bad that I look like Pig Pen after he realized that life basically sucks.  I hold my jacket in my hands as I look back and forth, before deciding to toss it into the bathtub.  No way in hell am I risking getting in there when I’m this drunk and breaking my neck, and this way the dirt is all contained.

            I turn on the sink, letting it warm up before I put my hands in it, washing off all the dirt and blood.  Man, I must be really drunk right now; I can’t really feel the heat of the water.  If it weren’t for the steam faintly coming off of the pouring water, I would have thought the water was room temperature.  Regardless, it was great to see the dirt flowing off of my hands and swirling down the sink.  Now that my hands were clean, I could successfully wash the grime off of my face.  I make my head perpendicular to the sink as I splash water on it and lather it with soap.  I keep my eyes squeezed shut while I do this, and by the time I open them, I see flecks of brown splashed up the sides of the sink.  As I blink the water out of my eyes, I see a drop of red fall into the murky brown.

            I look at myself in the mirror, and I can’t help but to think that something is off.  My skin looks rather pale, not that I have ever had a dark complexion, but I seemed paler than normal; there seemed to be the slightest tinge of blue in my skin.  Shouldn’t my flesh be pink from scrubbing the filth off?  God, I know I wouldn’t be overanalyzing myself nearly as much if I was sober.  But surely I would have noticed that my cheeks are sunken in, right?  I’ve never been a heavy man, but I know that my face should be fuller than this, right?  The more I over-analyze my face, the more it begins to resemble a caricature of myself.  I vigorously shake my face back and forth, spraying water droplets all over the bathroom.  I need to shake myself out of this, and I quickly regret my decision as I immediately feel dizzy enough to throw up.  I steady myself as I take another couple swigs of my amber elixir, which makes me feel better the instant it passes down my throat.

            I look at my reflection again and remember the reason I was looking so intently in the first place, the surprising drop of blood in the sink.  I look at myself again, and I have a moment of sober clarity as I notice the source of the drop; it came from the corner of my eye.  I noticed previously that my eyes looked pink, but they normally do when I stumble home in a drunken haze.  But I now realized that this was different; I’ve never seen my eyes nearly this bloodshot before.  I wipe the drop away from the corner of my eye with the back of my hand, smearing the dark, crimson liquid across it.  As soon as I wipe away the drop, another one wells un in its place.  What the hell did I do?

            I feel the back of my head over, thinking that I must have hit it, but I don’t feel any cuts or sore spots.  In fact, I barely feel anything at all; I guess I have my brown friend to thank you that.  I drink more of it before I realize that this could be part of some drunken hallucination.  That must be it.  The relief sets in as I continue to get ready for bed.  Thanks to the layers I am wearing, most of the remaining filth is on my clothes, not my skin.  I unbuckle my belt and pull my dirt-crusted denim off, throwing them into the tub to join my jacket, along with my socks.  Next, I lift off my formerly green sweater off my body and throw it over to join the other clothes destined for a solo wash.

            Now that I was down to my skivvies and my undershirt, I looked almost respectable again, with the notable exception of my off-coloured skin and my bloody eyes.  I wide away another tear as I take a final drink from my beer, setting it on the counter with a satisfying clink.  As I turn to leave the bathroom and head to a hopefully restful sleep, I notice a small stain on my undershirt; it’s a red line going down my chest, no bigger than the stroke from a fine-tipped marker.  Oddly enough, seeing this did not make me feel the usual fear of seeing blood under my clothes.  Usually this would imply that I was cut or stabbed, but the shirt’s material isn’t broken.  I confirm this as I stretch it out, looking for any minor tears.

            I quickly remove my shirt to indeed find a cut through my chest.  It looks old, and it’s not healed, or infected for that matter.  I gingerly touch it, but I don’t feel anything; my nerve endings should be igniting at my touch, but they stay silent.  At this moment, curiosity is ruling my mind, which prompts me to insert my finger into my wound.  It goes right through, and I can feel the jagged edges of my sternum.  This isn’t right for multiple reasons.

            I begin to feel something; it’s not quite panic, but more of the idea of panic; the flavour of panic.  I felt my ribcage more and noticed that several ribs were broken away at the sternum.  I remove my finger, expecting it to be soaked in blood and fluids, but it is only slightly tainted; it reminds me of an empty jar of jam, with scarce remnants left on the jar.  Why can’t I feel this?

            I grip both sides of the wound and pull it open.  Either I will see what the damage is, or I will feel an immense amount of pain.  Seems like a good trade to me.  I pull it open, and rip some of my flesh and muscle as I do so.  Why can’t I feel anything?  Once I have a big enough hole in my chest, I take a step back so I can get more light on myself.  Most of my ribs are separated from the left side of my chest, but they are still relatively in place.  How the hell can I still move?  I can see my lungs fill with air as I take a deep breath in, which is utterly surreal.

            I’ve never been good at biology, but I can tell that something is missing.  I stare at my gaping wound for a moment longer before it hits me.

Where the hell is my heart?

I sheepishly pull my skin closed as I feel a wave of shame wash over myself, like a child seeing a naked person for the first time.  How am I alive?  Was all of this dirt from a fall, or was it from a burial?  I take a couple deep breaths, feeling my lungs expand and contract as I do so.  I stare at my serenely gruesome self in the mirror, as a lone sound escapes my mouth.

“Huh…”

            There is no way that this should be possible, right?  Of course not!  I’m wrist deep into my own chest right now, there is no way I’m hallucinating this, I’m feeling more sober now than I ever have.  What the hell happened tonight?

- Cody S