Half-Raised

The floor is cold. Colder than it should be. I'm face down on it, my left cheek against the tile. I'm not getting up. It's not that I won't. There's nothing left in me that can.

My eyes are open. Six inches from my face, a line of grout runs off toward the tub. The little nightlight by the sink is on. The cabinet above the sink is open. The bottle's on its side on the counter, and some of what was in it is in my left hand. I know all of it without turning my head, without deciding to look.

There's a stretch of that night I don't have. I don't remember the hall or the cap coming off. I remember the mirror, or only that there was a mirror, and then it's gone. Then nothing. Then the floor. Somewhere in the part I've lost, a decision got made, and it wasn't me making it. I could be walked the whole way to a floor like this without once feeling like the one deciding. I never felt like I was choosing the direction.

I can't feel my left arm. I'm in a fetal position and I don't remember getting there. There's a wet place on my chest and I don't know what it is. I'm not afraid of it, and that's the part that's strange. The cold has come up out of the tile into the muscle along my ribs, and it isn't leaving. Neither am I.

My hand stays shut. I can't tell if it closed when I went down or if it's closing now. I'm not going to tell you what the label on the bottle said. Not now, not ever. The label isn't the question. The question is what happened in that room, and why my hand stayed closed.

If you'd seen me that afternoon, you'd have called me fine. Everyone did. Big man, six feet tall, built like a Viking, full white beard. Fifty years old that day. The one people came to when they came up short, never the other way around. I'd just built my family the house we'd always wanted, and I loved them more than anything on earth. Nobody looked at me and saw a bathroom floor ahead, including me. The strong one spends his life making sure nobody worries about him. You don't get walked to a floor like this in one night. It takes years, and the whole way down looks ordinary until it doesn't. Tonight is only where mine stopped.

My mouth's gone dry. I can't tell if I'm breathing in or out. I'm above myself now, looking down at the floor and the hand and my own bare back. The man on the tile isn't deciding anything. I'm not either. Something else in that room is.

I was raised in church, and somewhere down the years it wore off. By fifty I didn't believe in much I couldn't see or put my hands on. Then something came into that bathroom that I've never been able to explain and have never once been able to call nothing. I went down onto that floor sure of what was real. I've been unsure ever since.