Half-Raised

The tile is colder than tile is supposed to be. I'm face down on it, my right cheek against the floor.

I'm not getting up. That isn't a decision I'm making. It's just a fact, the same as the cold is a fact.

My eyes are open. The grout line runs away from my face toward the bathtub. There's a sock on the tile two feet from me and I have no idea how I got out of it. The light over the sink is on, humming. The cabinet above the sink is open. The bottle is on its side on the counter, and some of what was inside it is in my left hand.

I don't have the walk from the office to the bathroom. I don't have opening the bottle. There's a moment in front of the mirror that I half remember, and the moment ends in front of the mirror, and the next thing the body has is the tile.

You'll notice I say the body. I'm going to keep saying it, because it's the only true way to tell this part. The man wasn't driving. Hold on to that.

My left arm is somewhere I can't see. My right knee is bent under me. There's a wet patch on the front of my shirt and I don't know what put it there. The cold has come up through the cotton and settled into the muscle along my ribs, and it isn't going anywhere, and neither am I.

The hand stays closed. I can't tell if it has been closed since I went down or if it closed just now. I can't lift my head to see what's left on the counter, and I'm not going to tell you what the label said, not now and not ever. The label isn't the story. The hand is the story, what it did and what it didn't do, and I'll get there, but not tonight.

If you had met me that afternoon, you'd have called me fine. Everybody did. Six feet tall. Quiet. Built like a Viking, full white beard and all. Fifty years old that very day. Steady income. Just built his family's dream home. A family he loved more than anything. Nobody looks at a man like that and sees this floor coming. I want that said before anything else gets said, for the sake of whoever you know that seems fine, for the sake of you, if you're the one who seems fine. Nobody walks into this room in one night. You get walked here a year at a time by things with patient hands. The walking looks so much like ordinary life that the man doing it is always the last to see where the road was headed.