Recuperation

The mind's ranting and raving during a hangover

I slowly pried open my eyes and winced at the sunlight flooding into my room between the slats in the blinds on my windows. I painfully rolled over and glared at my alarm clock, trying to force my eyes to adjust to the god-awful brightness. As my clock came into focus the numbers unblurred and turned into what appeared to be a ten followed by two more digits that I didn't care to decipher. It was before lunch, at least, it had quite a while since I had woken up before lunch. I rubbed the sleep from my eyes and slowly sat up. The toxic feeling came flooding over me like a tidal wave. "Unngh!" I gasped as I fell backward into my soft down blankets, covering my face with my hands. I slowly made myself a cocoon out of them and nestled deep into the chasm of bird feathers. I tried to sleep, I tried to relax, I tried to do anything to take the remnants of alcohol away, I made my breath shallow to try and cope with the onslaught of toxicity pumping mercilessly throughout my veins. The room spun in biblical catastrophe, and when I closed my eyes to try and shut it out, the colors in my eyelids became more of a furious whirlwind then the real world was before. I felt like vomit. My fingers were stained yellow from the countless cigarettes I had smoked the night before. I could smell my fingers even though they were on the other side of one of my many coverings. That piney, tart smell that you never forget. That recognizable odor of twenty cigarettes passing through your fingers in a single night.

There is a point in your hangover,(if you refer to it as that, I prefer to name it the recuperation stage) when a whole new world opens up to you. This new world is strange and horrible, amazingly horrible. Your senses heighten and you are exposed to all sorts of different kinds smells and feelings that nobody but a drunk, or someone waking up after undergoing open heart surgery ever feels. The sun is way too bright, if you happen to cut your finger or prick yourself, the pain is excruciating. Cigarettes make you actually feel what they are doing to your body, and coffee raises you heart rate to alarming speeds. Just terrible.

It's nuclear holocaust of the body and mind.

I reached out from my safe haven and felt around on the desk until I found my small cd player nestled in between my laptop and my clock. I pressed play and listened to the soothing sounds of waves crashing on some foreign or maybe domestic beach (I hope foreign) and the randomized loop of beautiful whale sounds. Now, I know that people normally use these type of cd's for going to sleep, but I had bought a box set of the f*****g things so I could wake up peacefully on mornings such as this. I had every kind of soothing cd possible. Soft rain, the ocean, rain forest, chirping birds, thunder, the list went on and on. The only one that ever seemed to work for me was the ocean/orca one.

At about one o'clock I finally came out of my bedroom and stumbled into the bathroom to unload the rest of the barley and hops that poisoned my eroding liver. I flushed the toilet and groggily gazed at myself in the mirror. It's amazing the blemishes that one notices while enduring the recuperation stage. I won't go into details, but I was horrified. I shuffled over to my shower and slowly turned the knob toward the red arrow indicating hot and watched the water begin to fall onto the white tile floor. The steam rose and told me that my cue to enter had arrived. I stripped off my jeans and underwear and hung them on the towel rod facing my toilet and stepped into the temporary heaven that was mans crowing achievement in invention…plumbing. I stood for a while letting the hot water run down my head and engulf my body with the only beautiful thing that would befall me on the particular day. When I couldn't stand the vertigo any longer I sat down on the floor and sat and sat…. breakfast was not an option, nor was lunch, considering the time of day and my condition. So there I sat, naked, alone and feverish in my own little world, completely disaffected by the events that were taking place as everyday people living everyday lives went about their everyday routines. I was never like them, and I always thought that I would never, ever become them. Life is a funny thing, the aspirations that you have most almost never work out as planned, and there is always some sort of factor that must be added in that you never accounted for in your youthful fantasies. There is always room to try and convince yourself that you made your dreams come true once you finally do change and become what you never wanted to be, there will always be that smidgen of a piece of something that seems to be remotely close to what you originally saw yourself as in five, ten, or twenty years. And you can lie to yourself and make that fragment real in your mind, so you can say, "yes, I have become what I always wanted. Sure, maybe I took a different route, and yeah, maybe my life seems devilishly close to what I felt so strongly about, all those years ago. But hey, I'm here, I made it, I'm through." it's that little lie that keeps us going. It's that little lie that keeps us from going insane. The little lie that tells you that something is still there from when your skin still had elasticity, and that you didn't really change completely.

It's all you will have left. Ever.

Reviews

[AG]

hmm the creative value is astounding and this is a very enjoyable piece to read.

however, careful with over-poeticizing your stories. there had been instances that the flow seemed more poetic than a narration.

nonetheless, absolutely great job!

[Jean]

This is great!
I love how your character considers the hangovers as a way to see the world through entirely new eyes, and to be able to take everything in, even if it is painful to do so, instead of simply an effect of karma on them from having a bit too much fun the night before.
You don't say anything /about/ the character, but seeing as it's just a way to express how one might feel about hangovers (recuperation stages :P) it's not really necessary to know that much about them.
The pace of the story is nice and slow, letting the reader take in everything the character feels about this and gives them things to consider, I really like that. :)
A wonderful way to end this.
Its one of those endings leaves the reader sitting there for the next half an hour just thinking about it. I love those kind of endings. [:
To sum it up; it's short and sweet, but still thought-endearing. I absolutely love it.
Keep up the amazing work! :D