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Pictures from Kindergarten

Michael Trainor

    Today I woke up feeling empty. Must have puked all my guts down the drain again. It’s 6 a.m., my liver’s burning, and I’m still drunk from last night’s binge. I think this accomplishment calls for a toast. To something. To someone. Surprised to be awake, much less alive, I think if I had anything left to drink I might toast to the sun.
    Or the moon.
    Or the stars.
    Or her eyes.
    I stumble to get my footing. My head’s spinning like the room’s been doing for days. My eyeballs feel swollen and pressed tight against the insides of my eyelids, slowly being pushed out of their sockets by my swollen brain. My head feels like one of those Play-doh pasta factory play sets, where if you squeeze down hard enough on the handle little strands of clay are pushed through tiny openings in a hard plastic mold to make pretend food. Eyeball spaghetti. Brain dough.
    I stagger toward the window to greet the dawn. No sun. Just overcast and rain clouds frowning back at me for miles, or so I imagine. The factory outside my window doesn’t give much view of the horizon. Just enough to remind me the world is a dismal grey.
    Who am I kidding? I don’t even need to look outside to know what kind of day it is. The world’s been grey for a long time. Even when the sun’s shining it’s never really sunny. 6 months of no sun. 6 months of rain.
    I pause for a moment and wonder if the rain’s just been in my head. Couldn’t be, I decide. I heard Don’s basement flooded last weekend. It’s just bad weather. Bad timing. Bad luck. Just another blue morning wrapped in silver, with a hint of grey — just like her eyes. Maybe the rain’s just been in my head.
    Bad timing.
    Bad luck.
    Walking to the bathroom, I’m retracing my steps from the night before. Going backward through time, I see my shirt crumpled up on the floor beside my bed. Next I see my pants, one leg inside out, my belt running through only half of the loops, folded on top of itself in the open bedroom doorway. Walking through the hallway I see one sock here, one sock there, I see my tie outside the bathroom door, and I can’t find my shoes. Maybe I kicked them off at the front door. Maybe they’re gone forever.
    The bathroom itself is the spitting image of what my stomach must have looked like only hours before: a yellow green, shit brown mess of my insides in and around the toilet. Slop and spit. Sludge and slime. It’s at this moment I remember drawing pictures in kindergarten. With my brand-new, 72-color deluxe box of crayons, I tried to color a circle using every single one. They say white is what you get when every color in the visible light spectrum is mixed together in equal proportions.
    Pure white.
    As pure as the snow.
    No. Purer.
    Angel pure.
    Remembering my own pictures from kindergarten, I can’t recall ever getting anything close to white. Furiously I would scribble, first with blue, then with red, then with black, then with grey. Then I would move on the less common colors, then the colors with made up names. Purple Mountain’s Majesty. Fire Engine Red. Robin’s Egg Blue. And in the end all I ever got was a yellow green, shit brown mess inside of a circle. Just like my bathroom. Just like my life.
    Ketchup. Mustard. Mayonnaise. These are the colors that now paint my tiled bathroom floor. A thin green mix of relish and bile slime dissolve into a deep, viscous pile of alcohol and melted cheese. I can see blood next to something blue floating on top of a sea of spit and flem. A rich mosaic of colors from the inside of my stomach. Bile Green. Alcohol Brown. Blood Spit Red. My own brand-new 72-color deluxe box of crayons. A painter’s palate of all my bad decisions.
    Looking closer, I can see little bits of undigested food wading in the mess inside the bowl. French fries. Potato chips. Beef jerky. A whole slice of pickle. Macaroni. Chocolate pudding. Just thinking about eating these foods in any combination with one another is enough to make me vomit. I probably would have, had there been anything left inside my stomach to spew. I must have shoveled the entire contents of my kitchen into my mouth last night. An entire week’s worth of groceries piled one by one on top of one another, thrust into the depths of my stomach, now staring me in the face. Like dead bodies buried in a shallow grave, rising above the soil, reminding me of my failure to bury them.
    The odor rising from the bowl doesn’t smell like any one thing in particular. If I dared to venture any closer, my nose could probably make out some individual smells, but I’m not that suicidal. From here all I can say for sure is that it smells awful. A smell so bad I can taste it. Worse, I can feel it penetrating through my pores. Just like sweat, but in reverse. All of these vile smells acting on each one of my senses bring back vague memories of last night, huddled over the toilet bowl, wanting to die.
    Her name was Margaret Robbins. She called herself Maggie because she hated her name. I called her Peggy Sue. When we first met, her hair was the color of wheat fields at sunset, and her eyes were like the sky after a storm. Like my life after she left. She had a big heart and a sad smile and her skin was as white as the snow.
    Snow white.
    No. Angel white.
    We made love. I showed her my scars and she showed me hers. I told her how the heart surgeries I had as a child left me with scars running the length of my chest from my soft neck down to my belly button, and another under my arm from my chest to my shoulder blade. I told her how the doctors didn’t think I’d live very long. I told her how I defied the odds. How I should be dead right now but I’m not. I told her how my scars make me feel invincible. She said she knew the feeling.
    3 years, two break ups, and one botched marriage proposal later, I’m huddled over a toilet bowl wanting to die, the last three years playing back in my head. What if we had had one less fight? What if I had accused her one less time? What if she were wrong? What if I was? These questions fill my head, adding to my swollen brain.
    We didn’t have a good relationship, but being with someone you love but can’t stand is better than being alone, she figured. So she put up with me as long as she could. I’m surprised it lasted as long as it did. I thought it might last forever. But I knew it probably wouldn’t. I make a mess of everything I touch. I can’t recall ever getting anything close to white.
    I look down at the mess I’ve made and decide I don’t want to clean it up. Not this time. It’s too much responsibility for too little reward. It’ll just get messy again, I decide. I decide I’m tired of cleaning up my messes. I decide to end my life.
    I plod back toward my bedroom to grab the gun from my bedside table. I take it out. I load it. I don’t have anyone, so I load the gun. I take it with me to the bathroom. I return to the mess, and I sit down on the floor beside the bowl. I sit down in the alcohol and the cheese and the little bits of fries. I sit down in the bile and the puke and the spit and the blood. I sit down. I sit down and it’s like I’ve become a part of the mess I’ve made.
    I put the gun in my mouth and it’s thicker than I thought it’d be. I gag and I close my eyes. Even as I sit on the already disgusting bathroom floor, my first thought is about how messy the blast is going to be. How much of a pain in the ass it’ll be for my landlord to clean up. Better him than me, I think and I pull back the hammer on the gun.
    Death, I assume, isn’t much different than life. Well, my life anyway. It’s quiet, you’re alone, every day is the same, friends say they miss you but don’t visit, your family wonders where they went wrong, and there’s no sun. Not ever.
    No. Death isn’t much different than life. Living is death. One minute at a time.
    I take one last breath. I sigh and ask the God I don’t believe in why my last breath has to taste so bad. I think how the room’s going to smell a hell of a lot worse before they find me. Then I laugh. I smile and look down at the mess I’ve made. I think of all those pictures I drew in kindergarten, I think of Peggy Sue, and I pull the trigger.
    The gun fires, and my walls and floor are sprayed with just about the only bloods and fluids still left inside my body. A rich mosaic of colors from the inside of my skull now decorates the walls of my bathroom. A painter’s palate of all my bad decisions. Eyeball spaghetti. Brain dough.
    And instantly, my headache is gone.

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