I wake up

I wake up.1

My feet dangle from a board of plywood, peering under a forest green sleeping bag that swallows a limp figure next to me. It smells like sex, and it's cold. 2

I wake up.3

My hair is gone, and the stench of cigarettes wafts from a man who passes me on a bus. A stake body blue light flickers over head, and the passengers lurch in time with every slam on the brakes. 4

I wake up.5

I'm in the hospital, my arms are leopard printed purple and green, yellow and brown. There's a bowl of regurgitated lime jello shaking furiously in a tray that's spread across my lap.6

I wake up.7

I'm tangled in fleece blankets and cheap pillows next to the one that got away, his hair mussed between my fingers and his figure curled close, but not particularly eager.8

I wake up.9

And everything stops.10

--------11

Sometimes I sit and wish things, and I think I remember what's not put to paper, on files, legal documents. These messes and mistranslations and drunken ramblings. Small defenses.12

I wonder if it's strange that I dismiss my own recollections more often than not, hoping that my boundless imagination was the mother of my paranoia, my dizzy demeanor.13

I don't understand my ever changing morality. It sways like tides, in and out of social acceptability within hours, moments, against and with the currents of my developing mentality.14

In a year, I drowned in a hurricane of lifetimes, and came out well rounded.15

How?16

-----17

The silence breaks.18

"Stop screaming, Sadie. For fuck's sake."19

I want to strangle her pretty red head. She thrashes and struggles as her poor alcoholic father tries to wake her. She's seizing and wailing, she's a banshee overdosing on every hard drug your health teachers lectured you on. She's got barbwire fingernails.20

He's desperate. Nathan's prying those claws from his forearm that's still blistering from a burn he got cooking for fat tourists at some overpriced American/Asian hole-in-the wall down town.21

When he bleeds, she calms down.22

He back peddles and makes his escape to the bathroom, to cry and polish off the last of Jameson he hid behind the pipes.23

Sadie's in fetal position with a pillow between her legs now. She's quiet.24

The phone rings, and someone knocks on the door.25

I dismiss both and make a b-line for my bedroom, leaving Sadie in a Lifetime worthy mess against the couch.26