In the Zone

You don't want to be at work. You never want to be at work really, but today is just ridiculous. Yesterday (the ever changing standard by which you always measure the present) was ok except for when your dad called you to let you know that he's been recently plagued by nightmares about dying, and just though you should know. Oh, and then you remembered that it was your friends last shift at the bar and you sure as hell could use a drink. Why did you think it would be a couple of beers, man this sucks, and let's meet up next week so you can spend some of that unemployment? Instead it was an avalanche of shots. Bullets of Irish whiskey aimed with dead-eye accuracy for your liver and consumed as though if you ever stopped the Pope would die.

But you're not hung over.

Your legs feel slightly like jelly because they are filled with restless boredom. Your stomach churns as you shift in your chair. You don't want to be at work -- You want to be laying in bed, covered in flannel while flipping through the channels complaining about how there's nothing good on TV anymore. Maybe you just want to go to sleep. God knows you didn't get much sleep last night. Or the night before that. Or for too many nights to keep track of anymore. You're no doctor, but you're pretty sure that by going to sleep at an obscenely early hour on a Friday you can make up for the years of sleep you've been missing out on. A good, deep sleep that when you try to explain to others can only be done using trite phrases like "arms of Morpheus" or some other bullshit.

But you're not really tired.

Your mind is simply pre-occupied with the past. With memories of your life long ago that have faded around the edges. It's not really a surprise, they were things you didn't even really think about as they were happening much less after they were over. Now, however, you are desperate to seek them out again as though they were a lighthouse on the horizon; lose it and you, yourself, are lost. So you claw at the interior of your brain to regain those memories. You think about how you used to sneak into the fair every year for the sole purpose of ogling the older girls with their huge bangs and leg warmers and then go eat fried bread. Back before you relegated such things to the dustbin of pointless adolescence. You remember 3am at the breakfast joint with your best friend pouring liquor in your coffee under the table.

Getting handed the keys to your new car that was purchased by your dad in the shortest lived mid-life crisis ever, and having decided that it was impractical for a man of his age to be driving a sports car just let you have it. Trying to remember the name of that girl who sat in that very car waiting for you to kiss her, but you couldn't.

Then you find yourself laughing at the sheer absurdity of it all. At how amazingly different your life has become. At how much better and how much worse things are now. You wouldn't trade anything to go back to those days, and yet you would trade your very life to return to the memories. To return to the construct that you have built for yourself and can, sometimes late at night, convince yourself was the reality.