Grey

I stumble, my knees buckling under an invisible weight that throws me off-kilter. A concrete slab rushes up to meet me and I try to stop my cheek colliding into it by thrusting a palm in front of me. I miss, my arm flying wide and my face crashes into stone. Pain lances through me but I think nothing of it. I laugh, the thought of a garish bruise that would form there the next day flickering across my thoughts. But it doesn’t matter; I’m in too good a mood to care.

Something rises in me and I heave, spilling bile across the pavement and across my jeans and T-shirt. I manage to give another shaky laugh before I retch again, further covering myself in the foodstuffs I’d had for afternoon lunch. Looks like baked beans. I can’t take it seriously. It’s so funny the way they just lie there on the asphalt, bubbling amidst the malt that my body is trying to reject from my system. I laugh again.

Everything just seems so whimsical; so indistinct and grey. The street lamps, bathing the roadways and thoroughfares in a dusky golden light. The shrubberies and the trees that shudder in response to the cold wind that slams against me, further scattering my spew across my attire. There’s no one around to help. Not that they probably would help if they were. People are blasé like that, not that I blame them. Not everyone is so altruistic as to help a drunk in the dead of night. It takes a kind of bravery to offer a benign comfort to others.

I find it all hilarious.

I stagger uncertainly to my feet, hobbling down the pavement. My leg aches. The pain from that accident so long ago reawakened by my fall. It seems so long ago. It’s crippling. But the pain is indistinct now. Everything is. This is all I can do to make the pain go away these days. Tears blur my eyes from a pain I can longer feel. A sensation lost to me. I laugh.

I trip and pirouette into the road, collapsing on the tarmac. The pain is unbearable, or would be if it wasn’t so dulled by the substance that dotes through my bodily system. I retch again. Nothing comes up, not even the baked beans. Just some grey liquor that I had consumed an hour ago. It smells atrocious, everything does. But it’s all deadened. All dreamlike. So fanciful. None of it seems real. I pine and hope that it isn’t, but deep down I know that I’ll have to wake up eventually.

And if only for a moment I see it. Those two spherical orbs bobbing towards me. Sunny globes that cleanse all before them in a purifying light. The hum of rubber against tarmac and the klaxon-like blast that echoes down the street towards me. It seems so distant, the two spheres approaching, rushing towards me like the eyes of God gazing at me before he takes me in.

If only for a split second I register. I rise and throw myself away from the gaze of the deity, hearing its metal form rush past me, a finger’s breadth from me. Death on wheels. So close, yet so out of reach now. If only for today, I am spared. I feel as though I should relish this moment. The minutes of life I have been further granted. The thought seems puerile. I laugh.

For now, all that exists is the grey haze.