xp_logs | (The Trick Is To) Keep Breathing

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It’s morning.

You’re staring at a cup of black coffee, wondering when it went cold; you can distinctly remember seeing steam vaporing up. Today? Yesterday? The light in the kitchen flickers, and you catch your reflection, warped, in a half-empty bottle. It hurts to look at, makes the room sway dangerously, so you look back at the coffee, at the glare on the surface.

Something different happens: Someone pounds on the door, so you go see what the problem is. (A woman, bleach-blond, tanned, eyes rimmed with red. Were you expecting your landlord? It feels like you were; the eviction notice posted on the door confirms your first instinct.)

You let her in, because she’s waving a wad of cash around, and that’s always something you can use.

The woman talks for a long time, or what seems like a long time. You feel yourself nodding. Somehow, you have a page of notes when she leaves. It’s your own handwriting, scrawled, uneven, but you don’t even have the sense-memory of picking up a pen. You’ve got a name, George Diaz; when you unlock your phone, there’s a picture on the cracked screen. In the notes, a company name, shift hours for the week.

You blink. Afternoon light filters through the window. The summer air is still and heavy, sweat creeping down your neck. You hear traffic, voices, electric lines humming.

(You’d always wondered what it felt like, to go like this. You’ve seen others burn out, their blank eyes going flat and empty, the pause before speech longer and longer until speech finally just doesn’t come. Neither compliance with orders nor defiance, just a painfully slow slide to non-response. You once saw one step in front of a bus with no warning, and now you try not to envy her the determination it must have taken.)

You don’t have that determination. All you can do is wait.

And, while waiting, you might as well do something; so you grab your bag and your camera and your notes, and your old leather jacket in a fit of something like sentimentality, and you let the door swing shut behind you.