Sonny

I jolted up, or sideways rather, curled into a fetus on the dirty bathroom floor. The toilet seat was up, the remnants of a half-digested peanut butter sandwich buckshot blasted there inside. A voice outside the door kept calling "Sonny? Sonny? You all right in there?" I spat and flushed and spat again, and with such herculean effort as I've never had I managed "Yeah."

Which makes me either very stupid or very dishonest, for no man in my state would answer "yes" to "are you fine." I'd moved back in with Cousin Reg, fallen on hard times and harder drink, and what little dough I had I spent on ego. But he could see me through those doors, or else he might as well have. And Cousin Reg is older than me but his hearing's fine. He knew what scene had unfolded.

By the grace of God I stood and held myself up at the sink. What was this thing before me in the mirror? A man, supposedly, it had the marks of one; the eyes, the ears, the thinning hair. I was in a room made from my poor decisions, walls and roof built by my apathy. I could have taken charge and saved and acted better and asked questions and read and listened and thought and prayed and done a little bit more every day until every day I did so much, so much I'd hardly take it, a life filled with nothing but doing and being and understanding. And now I bunked with Cousin Reg, and there were beard trimmings in the sink and mold in the shower.

"Sonny?" he said again, and this time went to come on in, the doorknob rattling from my good sense to lock it. Though if I'd died in there—which, let's be honest just this once, might very well have happened—they would have had to break the door down, axe it up and see me through the wreckage like so many crumpled towels. Is that how I wanted to die? Is that how I wanted to live? "Sonny?" Reg asked me again. "You sure that you're all right?" And for what's left of what I call a life I'd no idea the answer.