Tangled String. Chapter 1.

I awoke to the previous night. The usual, groaning comfort of returning from oblivion was a memory. I didn’t stretch, or exhale in the long, sleepy fashion I was accustomed to. I simply opened my eyes and with a short flooding of realization, began turning the events of the evening over again in my mind. It was completely involuntary; not some memory of a movie or a piece of literature I loved – or hated for that matter – I’d replay in my head on long bus rides. My brain, still in a stun, just started reiterating and I got to see all it again, pausing and rewinding to hear her say those words; to feel them cut into me a second time. A third. For all I knew I’d been playing it back all night. I never remember my dreams.

My alarm clock went off startling me, however briefly, out of my thoughts. I didn’t look at it. I knew it said 7:00, and I knew I was going to wake up a few short-lived minutes before its nauseating beeps invaded my bedroom. I slammed the off button without turning, deafening the room again and for the first time that day looked at the sky through the window to see a grey, wet blanket of clouds blocking out the sun. Figures.

I think I attempted to swear something. Some curse against the weather, and my job, and the uncomfortable lump of blankets under my back, and God for that matter. I wanted the cosmos to know how pissed off I was at them. Some tiny noise – far from a word – escaped my mouth as I rolled over finally, in defeat. It sufficed right now. All I could muster. I stared at the wall a little longer, pushing off the inevitable: the slow, cold walk to the shower in my underwear; the coffee and whatever bread product I felt I could suffer down this particular morning, and the 9 hours I would spend at work today answering phones.

It was a low point. One of those mornings where the foreknowledge of what’s expected of you, a glimpse at the scope and scale of how insignificant you are versus everything you’ve set as goals for yourself threatens to end you. When it seems too impossible to even get out of bed; too big for one person in a single life time. And all the while I was painfully, mind-numbingly aware of how alone I was in this bed for the first time in years. My back was cold, no one was pressing against it, and the only breathing I could hear was my own, barely up to the task.

I didn’t want to be awake. Apart from how mentally exhausted I was, my body ached completely. I felt sick, disgusted, intensely angry, and ready to cry. I was the stump of a severed limb, hours after the initial shock, nerves waking to feel the horror for the first time. I wanted to scream in agony and want. But more than anything right now I wanted escape. I glanced at the clock again - 7:06 – and then curled deeper into the blankets and closed my eyes. To hell with work, to hell with calling in sick, to hell to moving at all. I figured sleep would push the emotion away, get my brain off the topic. If it didn’t? Whatever, I never remember my dreams.

I started drifting. I thought about her name. Erykah. I loved that it was her real name, the real spelling. I loved her parents for that matter, not just for naming her, for everything about them. They effortlessly maintained a zest for everything in their lives that I’d seen from no one else. I thought about the ring of Mayan hieroglyphics that was tattooed around her wrist to look like a bracelet, and how it hurt that after years I still couldn’t really tell you what it meant. Something about harmony and unity. I pieced it together from memory and some webpage, never wanting to ask her about it. I don’t know why, it was stupid. I thought about the rest of her body. And I thought about a few other things I care not to mention to you louts.

I may have dosed off for a few seconds before my whole body twitched violently and a jet of adrenaline pierced my blood stream. Some horrible thumping noise shook me viciously from sleep and I sat upright staring wide-eyed around the room. It was close to my head whatever it was, my first, frantic thoughts being images of some small, wild animal having crept into my room silently at night somehow, only to lie dormant and scare the shit out of me in the early morning. I was close.

It didn’t take long for the smear of white and brown material on the outside of my window to become evident to me, however with my heart still beating from the rapid return to consciousness it was a while before I could encompass what it was. I think I had an idea right away of course; it just seemed implausible that such a deafening thud could have been produced by this impact. It was when the first runny strands of the material had crept down the exterior of the glass to settle in the window frame that I finally managed to utter aloud to the empty room,

“Is that honestly bird shit?”

I’ll admit it got me thinking. The angry, “Screw you, world!” kind of thoughts you get at that hour. I was thinking about the chances of it happening. How, judging by the sound that piece of shit made, the bird must have been hundreds of feet in the air, making my tiny vertical pane of glass a very impressive bull’s-eye. It even got me thinking about the bird itself, carrying on with its eating, and shitting lifestyle, oblivious to me huddled beneath him in my covers feeling sorry for myself. It was comforting, that life as a whole was moving on without me. Maybe my boss would overlook my absence at the call center today entirely.

I started to slump back into my pillow but before I could fully formulate the notion the horrendous beep of my alarm sounded, shaking my fragile, early morning frame once again. I’d pressed snooze by accident. 7:09. Some distant corner of my brain, far removed from my troubles was laughing at me sitting there, naked I now realized, staring stupidly at the covers, unable to handle the small dose of excitement the day was already throwing at me. I looked at the bird shit again and almost laughed myself. Almost

Instead I threw the covers off, wrapped a towel around my waste and started my slow haul to the shower. As I passed, the bearded one was staring at me from his cross by the door. I shook my head and threw him a salute. It was getting harder and harder for me to believe that anybody, even a supreme being was making this shit up.