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At once, I watched my world come crashing down around me. Hung over, I awoke with the sticky movements of one who can remember, in sharp clarity, the spinning, drunken antics of the night before. Walking slowly to the bathroom, I scraped lazily at the stubble on my chin, and through greasy, beer-spattered glasses, vaguely sighed at my reflection.
Peed. Returned to the couch, where everyone was sleeping in a tangled pile, and remembered vagaries still danced like spectres in the wavering light coming from the ambling shades. My phone. Cold. Vibrating merrily on my bare leg.
The barefoot dance to the porch. Painful, still hazy. Nearly drunk. Rubbing fruitlessly for a while at the “Slide to unlock”, I realize that I’m sliding the wrong way, and finally answer. The voice on the other line is the same voice that I imagine calling to tell you that they’re very sorry that you have newly discovered cancer, honey dripping from every syllable like fluid from an IV. Don’t remember the beginning of the conversation well, just name, rank, image. 20-something female, probably curly haired, the cutesy, lookatme-allgrownup type. Probably drives a Volkswagen, if you get my meaning. Unfortunately, miss-twentysomething must inform me that someone, somewhere, doesn’t think I have enough experience to live abroad, thereby live, this coming year, but that I should try again the next year, because I sound like a prime candidate. Anything I can do about it? Nope, they’ve “tried hard to think of a reason for me to go, but golly, they just couldn’t think of anything.” That’s fine, I choke somehow. Have a nice day. Head now practically awash in a sea of alcohol and epic failure, I lean back against the wall of my dirty porch, and watch the cold sun rising over the jagged redwood teeth lining our complex.
The rest of that day was a miserable blur, a cigarette burning quickly towards the filter of another drunken evening. Don’t want to talk: just crack a beer, light a fire in the pit in my backyard, and wait for night to fall. Sleep, a welcome reprieve from a still beer-soaked, slowly turning world. The next couple of days even are fuzzy now. Lots of tragic thought, with even more brutally painful music. Lots of blastbeats, in high volume, at high volume.
And then, sudddenly and without warning, I changed. I metamorphosed into something altogether new and terrible. I no longer mourned the death of the life I’d planned, a year of bliss and knowledge away from the itching monotony that had become my everyday life. Not that I really had much to complain about, but then again, it’s hard not to complain when the work of an entire year is instantly and unceremoniously thrown down the garbage disposal. This new thing, this hard, black mask that was now my face: it hurt. The people around me suddenly knew it: this mask was after me. It poked holes in my face with it’s obsidian fingers, mocked my soul with a lashing tongue. My only two reprieves were my music, and my computer, or when that died, the small moleskine I had taken to carrying, it’s pages now stained with words of anger and estrangement. Every moment spent awake was under this mask, a leering grin plastered ivory over the supposed mouth, the eyes red rings over hollow craters. Only when I fell asleep did I feel relaxed, and even then, I’d have dreams that meant to bring me pain, or make me think of what could’ve been.
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