October 31st, 2005
2 AM
Blood will always be warm but yours is on fire, just like your face. And the inside of your mouth.
Fire similar to what you had found at the bottom of celebratory shots your friends bought you. Somewhere along the way those turned from celebratory to preventative.
And so went the night till it slipped your mind that there were worries to be had and dooms to look out for. Then you forgot you had secrets still hidden under your driver's seat, and your coat pocket, and your backpack. Then too where your keys were.
Alcohol only stuck around for so long, though, and as its company and yours disappeared over the course of the night, your guilts have come back one after the other. Especially now as you lay, a furnace, on top of your sheets beside an alarm clock reading 2:01 AM, when your eyes are projectors against the white ceiling, your own hellish slideshow cutting in and out over the spinning ceiling fan. Why did you never write him back? What had ever convinced you not to? And when you had to change your number, and you never gave it to him…
Drunkenly, but not without that practiced silence, you pull open your nightstand drawer and lift out a lone photograph - the only one in the entirety of your photos that you've allowed inside the house, for the time when looking at the hard stuff was easier than drinking it. It's one of your favorites, of your smiling brother over-taken by a solar flare from the review mirror. Probably ten miles out of Lyon, if that, totally unawares.
It would seem your only company for the night is nostalgia, who is never far at all from its companion, loneliness. And so you eventually fall asleep feeling drunk in more ways than one. The creased photo falls to the floor. For a short while you sleep soundly, content in the state you've put yourself in.
Until your eyes slam open, the moment you've been waiting for announcing its arrival with a bang from somewhere in your house, and you're sobered instantly.