Don't Forget to Write

Now What

The next morning a pounding headache woke me up. I rolled over, swinging my hand along the floor until it found my phone. The screen was blinding, forcing me to squint to make out the time. 5AM. I rubbed my eyes and stumbled down the hallway, bumping my shoulders into the walls with each step. Am I still drunk? I checked my surroundings. The apartment was rocking left to right like a boat. Yes, I was still a bit drunk. Bruno was already sitting in the kitchen, and when he saw me, he pointed to the green mug with Loony Toon characters on it; Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Tweety, and all of the rest. Beautiful black coffee had already been poured into it. The steam rose to my nostrils and filled my senses with that heart-warming flavor. Only a true friend would fill your coffee mug just in time for you to wake up and take a sip. We lifted our mugs in a cheer, as if to celebrate the fact that we were still alive. I put a pan on the stove and poured olive oil on it. "Scrambled?" I asked Bruno.

"Over-easy."

I cooked the eggs in the pan and toasted a couple of slices of whole wheat bread while sipping the coffee from my mug. We ate in comfortable silence. Once the plates had been licked clean and the last of our coffee had been drunk, I realized that we had nothing to do. We didn't have classes, we didn't have soccer, and we didn't have jobs. "Holy shit," Bruno said, reading the thoughts on my mind, "We are degenerates." I nodded. "What are we going to do with ourselves now, Petey Boy?"

"I was going to ask you that."

He shrugged. I shrugged back. Both of our minds spiraled into the regret of what lie beneath the rug that had been pulled out from under us, that rug being our collegiate athletics career. Luckily, Milo pulled both of our heads out of our own asses when he whined at our feet. "He needs to go out," Bruno said. Since we weren't on much of a time crunch to do anything else, we took Milo for the longest walk he had ever been on. It was Saturday morning, so the streets and the park were quiet. There were joggers in bright clothes, kids clumsily riding their bikes around, young men playing basketball in the courts while old men sat just outside the fence, watching the younger versions of themselves play ball, while some were playing chess on one of the tables. Everybody had the same relaxed look of contentment on their faces - the calmed eyes, easy brows, and loose lips reserved for a day of leisure and good weather. Many of the leaves on the trees were already beginning to change color, it wouldn't be long before they were crunching beneath our feet, then soon we would all be spending our weekends indoors, sipping coffee and watching the snow turn into sludge on the streets. Bruno and Milo and I all walked with our heads up, soaking in the scene, as if trying to live vicariously through every living thing in the park, which, in this golden hour, must have been the happiest place on Earth, even though just last night it was undoubtedly the scene of drug business and other crimes. As with most amazing things, it had a dark and a bright side. Chaos and Order.

We walked up into Washington Heights, around a public library and a cemetery, back down to Harlem, through the park, into Sugar Hill, and back up our 6-story apartment. The moment we got inside, Milo ran to his water bowl and licked the whole thing up.

We spent the rest of our Saturday studying and doing homework while a soccer game we didn't care about played from the TV in the background. By the end of the day the whiskey bottle that had mysteriously found it was to the coffee table had, just as mysteriously, become empty.

The CCNY team, my team, had a double-session practice today, and I was envious of them for having to run five miles and do whatever other fitness exercises Roberto had planned for them. I wanted that struggle, that pain within the muscles of a body pushing itself to its limits, that satisfaction of having done something better than you did the last week and knowing that it was a result of all the pain you had endured through training. I wish I could be with them, sharing in the misery of timed sprints and doing push-ups until failure. But instead, I was sitting peacefully on a futon, reading out of a textbook in my pajamas until my head hurt, taking a nap, and repeating several times.

The weekend passed slowly, and my lethargy seemed to drag it on even longer. Once, a Catholic school Priest told me that one day in the eternity of heaven would be like if you were on a beach, and each day on the mystical beach was measured by a hawk who flew down once every ten thousand Earth years to scoop up a single grain of sand. I argued that if that was the case, then eternity wouldn't actually be eternal, because eventually, the hawk would grab the last grain of sand. He responded that the amount of time it would take for that to happen would be longer than a human could imagine. I argued that if we were living in eternity, we wouldn't necessarily be human, and certainly wouldn't have the same perceptions of time as an Earth-dweller. Who is to say what 10,000 Earth years would feel like? Someone might grow so accustomed to it that the 10,000-year cycle would simply feel like a normal day, not eternity at all. In fact, maybe that is the case right now. That God gave us eternal joy and life, these 24-hour days might have been millennia to us once upon a time, but we became accustomed to it, and filled that eternity with minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, centuries. Then looked for anything to fill that time, like jobs, school, TV, books, church... what if we were living in the eternal glory of heaven right now, and we didn't even know it?

The preacher told me to stop reading science books and start reading my scripture. Anyway, the grinding cog of time, further slowed down by my head injury, had made it seem as though I had seen that hawk a lot these past few days between the hospital, the blur of returning to classes, being stuck up in my apartment struggling to retain any new information, and the simple fact that my heart was ached by my inability play the sport I loved. Everything was different now, my reasons for being in Harlem would have to shift.