Bricks
Break
In a moment, I stop understanding words. There’s an ache in my gut a rattle in my veins. Am I here? Where did I go? How do I get back? Play it cool.
“Where’s the bathroom? I’ll be right back” I say as naturally as I can.
I unloop the heels of my boots from the bottom rail of the barstool and they listen.
I can laugh now at the time they didn’t. How I leaned forward to slide off a chair like this one and the whole thing with me still in went crashing to the ground. The drinks flowed more freely that night. I hadn’t had to drive home. I hadn’t felt intoxicated that night by sours or by men. Mostly, I was clumsy and men and sours were bystanders to my folly, not causes.
On this night, that my body sways out of reality, there is even less intoxication. I am trying to feel my arms and my toes, something more than detachment. Step after step, I move with an unsteadiness. I wobble to the side. I put my hand out to the brick-face of the wall. I feel it’s grainy texture, like the stubble of an old man’s chin, the sweater scraper’s inspiration. It rips away the fine strands keeping me tethered to this evening. This contact with something concrete when I am not here, strips me from both worlds through which I tried to walk the seam.
I crumble like a sandcastle to the ground.
Have I come back to this world? Is it me?
“Are you ok?” from a far away place.
Where did I go?
“Do you need medical attention?” closer now.
There are faces over me, but the bar is full, there should be an empty space where I had been. My head slowly shakes refusal.
“Do you need an ambulance?”
“no”- slips out of my mouth, “i’m ok.”
Pieces start to come together as they hand me some cranberry juice, and I sit up slowly. I had made it around the corner of the bar. That explains where my seat went. I’m on the floor. The pieces that are coming back to me come back fully. There is no tugging to altered reality as the old woman scolds them to take away that drink. Dangerous cranberries that they are.
It was a warning, beware digging deeply, you can’t know what awaits.
