Clean Your Room
You slowly begin the path to consciousness after a restless and unhealthy sleep. You hear the distant sounds of someone outside coughing. A garbage truck. What sounds like a rice cooker alarm going off.
Your brain feels like it has swelled a bit inside the safety of your skull and the pressure evokes a dull heartbeat behind your now stiffly opening eyes. As you stretch out a bit, you find yourself cataloguing odd pains: your right ankle is compromised, something about your left middle finger knuckle isn’t quite kosher, and your lower back has the strained rubber band feeling as if getting up too fast will result in a snapping and agony from your toes to your shoulders.
You gingerly reach over to your smartphone to see what time it is and the shock splashes across your instantly awake mind: four years? You’ve been asleep for four fucking YEARS?
As the sunlight shoots rays through your blinds, you can start to make out the devastation in your room. It smells like burnt hair and old shoes. You see a red ball cap in the corner. A piece of what looks like an architect’s model of a tall fence. A torn poster with immigrant children staring at you through chain link with those big eyes usually reserved for velvet paintings from the sixties. A copy of what looks like your birth certificate is wadded up in the corner near the ball cap; it looks like maybe you wiped your ass with it after one of those shits that causes you to wipe and wipe as if the feces simply won’t completely clean off unless you grab a t-shirt and wet it in the sink.
Strewn around the room are remnants of chaos: a surgical mask, an empty clip from an AR-15, a misspelled makeshift sign, a stained t-shirt with what looks like a hammer and sickle airbrushed on the front. A stack of wrinkled paperwork next to a deposit slip from the unemployment office. The sour smell of dried urine in your bed—did you piss yourself or did someone drain themselves on you?
There was a fight. Or maybe multiple fights?
As you piece together how you ended up asleep for so long, a modern day Rip Van Winkle, you realize that like Griffin Dunne in Scorsese’s After Hours that the night was not supposed to go so wrong but wrong it went.
Oh fuck. Someone has to clean this fucking mess up.
You look over and see a wall calendar. It seems you have thirteen days to exorcise whatever havoc has been unleashed. It doesn’t matter how it all unfolded. You’ll figure that out later.
Right now, though, you need a cup of strong coffee, some Advil, and it’s time to clean your room because no one else is gonna clean it for you.
