The Day After

A return to sobriety amongst the pieces of a perfectly normal Sunday.

It was a perfectly normal Sunday.

Thin strands of summer sunlight trickled through the blinds, glittering in the broken glass where Andreas slept. Dried blood and wine was spattered about him. It looked like a murder scene, and he like a dead man. A few signs of life, if you could call it that, showed in the shallow panting of his breath and the greasy sheen of sweat on his face. He stirred now and again, rolled this way and that, trying to steal a few more moments of rest from the sweltering heat and the hard linoleum floor. At the stroke of noon, however, the last drop of liquor in him was spent.

He awoke with a start.

The return of awareness was marked by three qualities for Andreas. The first of these was that his mouth was dry as ash and tasted like death. This drove him to embark on the laborious project of standing up and walking to the kitchen. The second quality hit him as he rolled onto his hands and knees. It was the dull aching pain of having slept on the floor mingled with the far sharper and more distressing pain from the gash in his hand. The final quality, which made itself known just when he had managed to stand up, was a sudden gut-wrenching nausea. It brought him back to the floor just as quickly as he had stood up.

As he held on to the floor for dear life against the nausea and the spinning, Andreas began recollecting the fragmented impressions of the night before. The park at midday; banter with the boys; beer. David’s courtyard; impromptu barbecue; red wine. David’s apartment; the girls showed up; rum and tequila. That’s when the party started.

He feebly began to pick at the pieces of glass on the floor, tossing them to one pile. So much for my last wine glass, he thought, and so much for the wine. He must have passed out on the chair and taken the glass with him when he fell. A vague hiss came from the headphones that lay draped over the fallen chair. Five o’clock rock n’ roll with leftover wine, the usual ending to a good night.

Had Hanna been there? He couldn’t quite recall. He had hoped she would be. Now he hoped she hadn’t. I’m an asshole when I drink, he thought. Maybe she had left early, before the usual circus started? Or perhaps she had left after he had taken his shirt off and let the assembled draw their masterpieces on him? Evidently he had done so, judging by the crudely drawn genitalia on his chest. Either way, he couldn’t remember.

He crawled to the kitchen. It was an admirable show of acrobatics when he hoisted himself up onto the counter, even going so far as to end the deed with a flourish when he vomited into the sink. The sunlight broke into a flurry of greens and purples. Glitter.

A few more fragments of the night came back to Andreas. Dingy night club; flailing arms on the dance floor; overpriced drinks. He resolved not to check how much he had spent. The mere thought of it hurt more than the headache. But there were more emotions than just regret that began to surface among these jumbled fragments.

Blonde hair and damned funny. They had joked and teased, bantered and laughed. He couldn’t remember any of the jokes, only that they had both been on fire. The woman had made him feel like he wasn’t a bumbling fool, but a man of razor-sharp wit and roguish charm. He smiled at the thought. He couldn’t remember her name.

Old friends. It was ages since they had last met. They had shared war stories from the good old days when the parties were wilder and the hangovers less miserable. Most days Andreas felt like a castaway lost in an ocean of beer and regret, but not last night. Last night he was back on dry land. He had history and substance, if only for a few hours.

Sounds and sights. The music stilled played in the back of his head, fresh new beats mixed with old ones he had come to love. Music doesn’t sound the same sober, he thought. You need the blood to be on fire to really dance, for the darkness and the neon to come to life. And last night was full of life, almost enough to make him feel alive again.

Maybe he should call his old friends? Maybe, but not today. Today was about survival.

Andreas shook himself from his reveries and threw back several glasses of cold water. It washed away the worst taste in his mouth and made him feel like he might just pull through. He waddled back out into his living room.

STOP.

The sign commanded him from out of the dim light of the hallway. He hadn’t seen it when he had crawled to the kitchen, but there it was. Bright red, imperious, with pole and all, propped up next to the front door. That was another thing that Andreas had forgotten about.

He groaned when he saw it. He was in no shape to leave the apartment, much less carry the sign back to wherever he had found it. With a bit of elbow grease and a lot of swearing he dragged the sign into the small closet in his bedroom and stuffed it in among the boxes of unused clothes and old books. The effort caused his nausea to return with a vengeance. He sat himself down in the dark room, back against the closet door and his head between his knees.

One more month of this, then I’m quitting. I’ll never drink again.

In a month’s time would be Andreas’ birthday. He had made the same promise for the last five years.

Andreas was thirty-six, and this was a perfectly normal Sunday.