The Inkwell presents: A Coat, A Message

Déja Vu

Written by Danielle Ione

Ryan awoke with a start, a haze lining the walls of his mind. His thoughts were slow to come together, each word colliding with the next, incoherency at its finest. The only thing he could get from them was the volume, loud and inescapable, awakening him from a deep sleep.

Smoothing a hand over his face, he opened his eyes, squinting against the sunlight. Ryan wracked his brain, trying to think of what happened the night before, but where memories should be, there were blank spaces. Nothing came to mind—the disconnected ramblings of broken thought patterns not yet close to finishing the puzzle. He struggled against the fog; a hopeless endeavor, this much he knew.

The room spun, but his body stayed still, gripping the sheets around him as he waited it out. His brain detached from reality, the reality that was sitting perfectly still, while his mind played tricks on him. It felt as though his brain had simply gone offline, pausing in the void while the rest of him continued. As soon as it passed, he shook himself off, chalking it up to just another symptom or two on his list of fucked up things that had been happening as of late. Dizziness, déja vu, brain fog, and now, memory loss. Even when it was new, it wasn't unexpected.

Groaning, Ryan got out of bed. He stood too quickly, the world turning on a dime yet again. Ryan stumbled, his hands shooting out to catch himself as he braced against the wall beside him. He squeezed his eyes shut, waiting for the feeling to pass, counting to ten...twenty... thirty before it finally subsided. Ryan knew that this had happened before. Maybe not the moment, exactly, but this feeling in the slowly fading haze. It was as if his consciousness and his body were on two different trains running parallel to each other, but not intersecting. He held on to the wall until it faded. Until the two tracks converged once again, and he was free to pretend as though it didn't matter, as though it was expected.

As though he was normal.

Stumbling to the coffee pot, he hastily started the machine, watching the water turn to the golden liquid of the gods. He felt the panic rise inside of him as he avoided thinking of how he had felt mere minutes before and what he was trying to distract himself from. Ryan reminded himself that this type of thing was a frequent occurrence. Weird lapses in judgment, a feeling of disconnection; it was all within his realm of normal. He reminded himself that there was nothing a little coffee couldn't fix. At least, that's what he told himself. The panic wouldn't be sated with such a weak affirmation, however. So he analyzed his behaviors, his moods, his every move. He was coming up with the consensus that it had to be from lack of sleep. Or maybe, his alcoholic tendencies had caught up with him, and he was finally facing their impact. Either way, he needed to start taking care of himself better. Caring about himself, even if it was only half a fuck more. He may have hated his life enough to want to drown it all out with a bottle of whiskey each night and a beer or six each day, but he liked himself enough to want to care.

Noticing the time, Ryan grabbed his cup of coffee, jumped in the shower, inviting the ice-cold water to run down his skin; an unwelcome wake-up call. The shock of the water sped up his heart rate, the beating crashing into his chest as he fought for air to breathe through it. The longer Ryan stood there, the more his brain started to clear, however, so he stayed perfectly still and focused. No memories came back, but he could detect full sentences in his thought pattern now. A reboot, of sorts. His mind was coming back from its hiatus, slowly but surely. All crises averted. For now, anyway.

After dressing quickly, he bounded off for work much in the same way he did every day: lost in thought. He was lost in his phone or lost in a book. Just plain lost. His eyes were anywhere but in front of him, off in the past or future but never the present. His head always in the clouds, keeping a certain cushion of distance between him and the real world around him.