Long Sentence - Waking

If I’ve still got my clothes on when I wake up I’ll check first for my wallet, then phone, then keys, until I’m sure I haven’t lost anything important, and then I’ll typically roll over and try to form some narrative out of whatever blurred scenes I can recall from the night before, concerned about any overt offenses I may have committed to friends or acquaintances but more concerned about whether or not any of them have found me out, gotten to the bottom of any number of my ongoing lies to discover that I actually hate their art or their band or their boyfriends’ friends, or that, yes, I was fucked up at work the other day, or, yes, I’m the one that’s been pocketing your extra percocet, or, yes, I’m sad and I’ve been this way for a while and the only way I can approach feeling alright is to try and feel nothing, and then I swallow some of those stolen painkillers and think about how lucky I am to be in America today and not a child soldier in Africa or a Jew during the Holocaust or a cat being tortured somewhere by some suburban adolescent psychopath and I wonder why my heroes all died young or killed themselves, wonder why I could never plan for my own life past 23, which is the age Joy Division’s Ian Curtis was when he hung himself in his kitchen, only days before he was supposed to travel with the band to the states for their first U.S. tour, and by this point I’m starting to slip away so it doesn’t matter—nothing matters after that.