Nothing happens all at once. That’s what happens when you run out of Benadryl and take a bunch of oval blue sleeping pills out instead. Three little pressed plastic bubble-foil sheets, full say. Sixteen pills to a sheet, 4x4. That many pills, and you pace the apartment living room and try sitting down in various different chairs and poses while you wait. You wait to find out what’s going to happen with the TV off and the radio alarm clock unset and the phone not ringing and your stomach making odd little mewling noises from eating ¾ of a bag full of microwave popcorn. This is what happens--

It gets to be morning, despite all the drawn shades and fluorescent kitchen lights. You notice the yellow crumbly stuff from the popcorn that is under your nails and the diagonal yellow popcorn grease stains on your shirt. You wait to find out if you’re going to pray or throw up or call a friend or sister. You wait to find out if the bee is still on the patio buzzing around which you hope it is not as you’d like to go out and have a cigarette while you wait. You pick up a notebook and pencil and start writing to pass the time and you write about what you’re doing and where you’re doing it and why you’re there. And you don’t have a goddamn fucking clue what happens after you stop writing or what you’ll do with it when you’re done, and you don’t know if you care to find out, so you keep writing, on and off, for days. Just as you’ve been doing for the last umpteen number of years. You write until you remember that you’re still awake and that’s probably because you only took two pills after all: the last pink benadryl and also a little heavy blue one. There just happened to be a lot of empty sheets to root through in the drawer, from all those other nights.

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