At seventeen past two, I pounded on the door of heaven. I told them it was urgent; that I was about to die on a bathroom floor and was itching to get it over with. They told me to try again tomorrow, because once it was after half-past one, they had some sort of policy. I thought that was ridiculous, so I just kept on kneeling over the toilet bowl and tried my damndest at praying my way into heaven by the end of the night.

Nevertheless, I wasn’t welcome in death. Not that night, or any other night that has followed since, which seems like it would be much better news than it was. In the moment, though, I felt like a petulant and impatient child and instead only wished to bash my head to the floor and solve absolutely nothing, choosing to simply sulk in my utter despondence. All I could do was rock back and forth– these sort of bobbing, oceanic movements– as I hunched over the porcelain. What was striking was the simple fact that I thought it would be particularly convenient to die, then, and I wanted it to be my moment to go. This was not out of sheer suicidal fantasy, rather, practicality and wishful thinking. 

After some time I realized the sickness had passed and took that opportunity to lay down on my side and bring my knees to my chest. I would leave in a few minutes, I reasoned, though I was becoming increasingly more attracted to the idea of sleeping on the blissfully cool tile right then and there considering it was quite comfortable for such an objectively unpleasant experience. Just for something to do, I passed the time by imagining how the morning would look if my wish was fulfilled and I actually did die in that bathroom. The sun would be coming in the frosty, east-facing windows, pouring onto the door. Someone living in that dorm hall would come to brush their teeth or wash their face, ready to begin their Sunday, and they would bump my obtrusive, tender head that was blocking the door from opening all the way. Of course, they would try to talk to me for a moment– and when this proved to be unproductive– would call the police who would kick the door down and declare my death in some blasé, routine way. It’d look like a crime scene, my hair dried from being sweat-soaked and plastered hardened against my forehead, my body heavy and unless and covered in my own sickness. They would have to call my family. There would be a funeral that would be a terrible, boring affair where distant relatives judged my mother and called me a junkie over a casserole. It was no longer appealing when I was entertaining it rather than simply accepting it. Just the thought that this would happen, however improbable, was enough to encourage me to lean against the wall, where I then attempted to gather the courage to stand. 

My god, I thought. I wish I still thought I was dying. 

I had found myself in this bathroom that was not mine because a lovely girl had let me into her dorming quarters as I wandered around outside. She was a plain sort of beautiful, but I did not recognize her and was left slightly baffled that she had ushered me inside when I very well must have looked like a random, strange man hanging around what I would come to find out is woman-only housing. In retrospect, I must have looked entirely aimless and more than a little frightening as I smoked my cigarette (barely able to stand) on the sidewalk for her to suggest I go inside to use the bathroom or the house telephone. She had left essentially the moment she let me in and I was busy fiddling with the phone. 

“Goodnight.” She waved. I did not know how to respond, but I tried, though I cannot recall what I may have said in reply. Most likely a thanks. Before she was halfway up the stairs, I was looking around for a bathroom. After some bumbling trial and error, I found one off the foyer.

Maybe she was a vision. A guardian angel. 

The phone fiddling had largely been for show, for I had no one I could’ve called. I was messing with it when I first began to feel sickest, though, so I abandoned the seemingly Herculean task nearly as fast as I attempted it. Before I gave up, for about as long as it took for me to raise the phone to my ear, I had considered just phoning 911. I believed it would be much more polite to notify someone to take care of my dead body in the case I actually did collapse instead of just leaving it there for some poor housekeeper or college girl to take care of the next morning. 

It took a few moments of struggling (mentally, more than physically) for me to eventually leave the bathroom, after I was certain the worst effects of my combined ill-decisions of the night had passed. I was left with a terrible headache and not much else– that and the unreal, dreamlike feeling that walking drunk created but was otherwise unobtrusive. As I walked out of the dorm and back into the buzzing cold of the empty street, I had two desires: to find something to eat and to, at some point, collapse into bed and sleep for as long as my body would allow me, which would ideally carry me into the next week without many more waking moments that weekend. 

The first desire was harder to fulfill. Because it was the middle of the night, I did not live in a particularly metropolitan area, and I wanted to be able to sit somewhere, I almost wrote this task off before I even got very far into trying to accomplish it. I reasoned with myself, however, that if I stayed up for a few more hours, I would be able to accomplish my second task much easier if I was going to bed at six or seven in the morning instead of three, or even an hour or so later at four. The inconvenience would cost me some time, but I could put up with that– in fact, I wanted to kill as much time as I could before I became too much of a dead man walking. 

Stumbling down Main Street I felt the most alive I had felt all night. Despite everything, I could feel the cold on my lips and on my fingers, the texture of the uneven road through my shoes if I concentrated hard enough. There is a sort of equating “alive” with “joyous” or “happy”, and that is not what I mean. In this instance, I mean that I was achingly aware of every part of my body and life in a way that seemed to stretch for an eternity in my mind. Every regret I ever had surfaced. I kept waiting for a car to pass by to signal that another person out there was alive and existing, but the world seemed strangely desolate for a Saturday night, no matter what time it was. Someone out there, I said to myself, must also be awake and hoping somebody else is as miserable as they are right now. Surely this is true. No matter how certain I was, no cars or people passed, and I continued walking.

It was an aching dichotomy. How could I have come from a party, with god-knows how many people crammed into a too-small space, to this? Barren and entirely alone? Had everything been wiped from the face of the earth in the time that I spent on that bathroom floor? There are people, I thought somberly as I nearly tripped and fell over a crack on the pavement, who are happy tonight. Good for them. What I couldn’t really bring myself to think, but I still knew deeply and in a hidden way (perhaps at the base of my spine or in the sensitive, vulnerable part of my neck) was that I could not really recall a time in which I had been one of the other people. There was not a time– certainly not in recent memory– where I had gotten into bed and felt like more than fifty percent of a person, but I had no shortage of memories of me stumbling away aimlessly after I decided whatever uplifting experience I craved would not be found in a random person’s smoke-filled house, the garage of similarly desperate people clinging to the promise of more or afters, or the room of my friends who were starting to become emotionally stranded from me the more we both left sobriety. With the first reminiscent wave of sickness since I had removed myself from that dormitory bathroom floor,  I knew that I would be doing the exact same thing next week at the exact same time and hoping the next would be better. At that, I decided I felt it all in the spaces between my ribs, which I imagined contained some sort of fleshy, throbbing tissue. 

Approaching and seeing the blue light shining off of the tin exterior of Robinson’s was the closest I could get to going to heaven that night. Even though it was the only thing open at the hour within a reasonable walking distance, I would’ve preferred to be there more than any other place in the world nonetheless. It was an old, long building– Robinson’s had the Longest Bar in a Diner in the United States, according to the plaque hung on the wall next to framed newspaper clippings that looked older than me two or three times over and menu additions on colorful printer paper. No other patrons were inside. The sole waitress spoke to the two line cooks from behind the counter, only turning to acknowledge me when I sat down at the bar. It felt much more polite than sitting in one of the booths and making her have to walk over to serve me. I propped my head up with two fingers pressed against my temple, elbow on the counter, and wished I had a proper chair. 

“Hi, can I get you something to drink?”

“Coffee, thank you.” The rawness of my voice startled me slightly more sober. She handed me a menu, the lamination peeling away from itself, the corners flimsy from how they had been folded over and over by ruminating patrons. I looked at a whiteboard behind her with a scrawled list of pastries and pies. “And water. Do you have any pie right now?” 

The waitress shook her head and pulled an apologetic smile. “Sorry. Morning staff bake those.” 

I waved my hand dismissively. Pie, in all honesty, had seemed like my best option simply because I did not wish to make any decisions at that moment, even one as simple as what combination of food I wanted in my breakfast special and how everything should all be made. Eggs in particular seemed utterly repulsive to me then (for some reason, my mind would only let me conjure images of them grossly undercooked and pooling), so I blurted out some idiotic question asking her what they had that did not also serve eggs even though the menu was in my hands. In order to save face, or maybe make myself feel better, I tried to look for a nametag so I could use her name in my request, but found she didn’t have one. Robinson’s employees didn’t wear uniforms– just surplus-stock black aprons– and she was wearing hers folded down and exposing her grass-green sweater that looked so downy and delicate I wished to reach out and touch it. There was a stain (coffee?) on the sleeve. 

“We have pancakes. They come individually; dollar-twenty-five per.”

“Can I have two of those?” 

She hummed, called back to the kitchen, and went to get my coffee from the pot. “Cream and sugar?”

“Yes, thank you.” I lifted my legs slightly to remove my left hand from where it had been warming under my thighs and pushed my hair out of my eyes. I couldn’t tell if it was damp, or if it was just so cold from my walk that my frozen fingers were mistaken. The napkin holder next to me was foggily reflective and when I caught sight of myself in it, I nearly got up and left. Overhead lighting has never been very flattering for anyone, but I looked especially horrid, able to see the bags under my eyes and wind-whipped red flesh on my cheeks even on unpolished stainless steel. The waitress placed a mug in front of me, obstructing my reflection, and poured me my coffee. It was only then that I realized my hands were shaking rather severely and were rather useless when it came to such nimble tasks as opening the single-serve half-and-half packets I had been given. I couldn’t manage to separate the plastic of the top from the bottom with how small it was, my index finger flipping at it in vain. My left hand proved to be just as incapable considering it was my non-dominant hand and I was still quite drunk. In the midst of my struggle, the waitress placed my water onto the counter.

“How many do you want open?” She asked, already getting one of the packages open without me even replying. I was stunned, looking up at her with my mouth open dumbly as she worked, her gaze downcast. When she got the first one open, she placed it helpfully next to my mug, picked up another one, and met my eyes. 

“Three,” I replied, surrendering the packet I had failed at opening. “I’m sorry.”

“You’re alright. One of the regulars has Parkinson’s.” 

“I don’t have Parkinson’s. I’m just a little drunk.”

She finished with the creamer and even went as far as stirring it in, like I was a child. My face warmed and I reached for the sugar, having a much easier time tearing open two packets and pouring them in, only spilling a negligible amount of coffee in the process. “Did you walk all the way here? From the college?”

“Yes.” I nodded vigorously and took a greedy drink of my coffee, scorching the roof of my mouth. “I was at a party. What’s your name?”

“Amy.”

Amy reminded me of a family friend I had known as a child, Autumn. They both had black hair so dark and even it was obviously box dye, blue eyes that stood out nearly abrasively next to her other features, and a mole that might’ve been drawn on with an eyeliner pencil. I couldn’t parse how old she was, but initially settled mentally on 27. Later, I would think of the slightly juvenile way she spoke or the freshness of her fashionable nose piercing and knew that I could’ve been wrong; that perhaps she wasn’t much older than me. She leaned against the counter while I put my head in my hands and breathed for a moment, forgetting to reply to her or speak again.

“What sort of party?” Amy encouraged when I didn’t say anything. The counter had blue specks that I had become very interested in. My mug left a ring of coffee I attempted to clean up with a napkin. It was like I suddenly had no desire to speak to her whatsoever, and that after finding out her name, there was nothing at all left for me to learn and I was no longer interested. 

“A house party.” Saturday night parties were a stupid, desperate thing. No one who had a good night on Friday felt it necessary to go out again on Saturday. The air always smelled worse, of more potent cigarette smoke and body odor. If you stood around long enough outside, there was a good chance someone would come up to you and begin crying, whether you knew them or not. It would always be about problems with their preferred sex, if not someone in particular. In the rare chance this wasn’t true, their problems, at the very least, would boil down to being lonely. “Just a normal sort. Do you have any painkillers?”

“Something a little stronger, I think. I have a bad tooth.” She reached down under the counter and began rifling around in her purse the second I asked. 

“Stronger?”

“Prescribed paracetamol,” Amy explained, shimmery blue eyelids fluttering while forearm-deep in her bag. “If you’d want it.”

Even if she had been offering me something as banal as a crumpled receipt or as absurdly dangerous as cyanide, I would’ve accepted just because I was shocked by the sheer forthrightness of it all. “Alright,” I mumbled, intending to smile but forgetting all while she retrieved the rattling prescription bottle from her bag. She tapped a pill from the bottle and handed it to me without looking into my eyes. Suddenly, she became quite beautiful to me. 

Behind her, one of the cooks put my meal onto the window and called her name. While I could be incredibly mistaken or extremely presumptuous– or both– he almost seemed to look at me like he knew exactly what had just happened and that it happened often enough he could pick up on it with ease. The look was near-identical to the expression a friend would give me from across a room when I was speaking to a girl I would end up bringing home later in the night. Despite whatever I had just been thinking, I became embarrassed, and looked away until she placed the food in front of me. 

“Thank you,” I told her, intending for that one thanks to cover multiple things I noticed then I had not thanked her for. She left me alone for a moment, and I was thankful for the brief reprieve that I attempted to use to eat. Halfway through clumsily cutting my pancakes, I looked back towards Amy who had now busied herself with counting money at the register, startled.  “My name is Simon.”

She continued on with the register, long, painted nails flipping through the dollar bills as she counted. “Hi, Simon,” was her simple reply, a wisp of a smile on her lips. I felt oddly defeated at the thought that, had I not offered it myself, she could have gone on without ever asking for my name. I took a sip of my coffee, perhaps as more of a distraction and something to do than anything else. Amy’s nails clicked away. 

Over and over, I ran my tongue over the raw, burned ridges of the roof of my mouth. I took another sip of the coffee and sucked on my tongue; tried to touch it to itself to feel my taste buds that I imagined were completely gone, somehow; that it my tongue was now some useless, smooth organ hanging limply in my mouth. The warmth of the coffee filling my chest felt like a small mercy, one that I hoped would tether me to the moment more than it actually did. Nonetheless, I waited, and watched her. The way she moved, the way the harsh light caught the halo of stray hairs around the crown of her head, the way she counted the money in the register: it felt almost rehearsed, or that I was watching a film. Every night she did this. Every night, some castaway found themselves anchored at this very diner and sitting in this very stool. And all of them– all the men that sat in this exact spot and talked to her and were offered prescribed paracetamol and a refill on coffee– thought they were the only, or the first, or the most special. That Amy was lonely in the ways he was lonely (in the ways in which I was lonely) and that she would go to bed that morning thinking of him, a face she’d never seen before in Robinson’s; wondering if he would come back during her next shift. Hoping he would. What was her life like outside of there? What did she go home to? I imagined her life outside of Robinson’s: a small, cluttered apartment with clothes strewn on the floor and full ashtrays on her windowsill. Could she live in one of the studios overtop the shops downtown? Did she have a home at all, or did she exist floating through a string of couches and friends’ beds that she cycled through? 

As I watched her for another moment, all of this on my mind, I thought that perhaps none of this was true. That she really only had a battered handbag for practicality and her pills were for that bad tooth of hers she had so innocently gotten from taste-testing too many sweets working late nights. She naively trusted strangers and was cautiously nice to strange young men out of the goodness in her heart or he reminded her of a friend who had totaled his car speeding down i-95 or a brother who hung himself. Amy was unshakable in this final imaginative version of her that I conjured up– the version that somehow seemed the most probable just because of how I would’ve never thought it of anyone else I had those knee-jerk bohemian, indulgent fantasies of. At five in the morning, she would clock out and make it home for a nap before church with her mother at ten. How presumptuous was I; expecting that if I just looked long enough at whoever I stumbled upon that day, I would find some sort of loneliness. Rather, that I would find some sort of parallel existence to my own. Amy, I decided then, was a sweet and responsible girl. She was not showing me pity– instead, it was a sort of genuine kindness. Really, that only managed to make me feel a multitude worse. 

“Are you feeling any better?” I only realized I had been silent for far too long when she broke the silence, not looking over at me still. “You look a little better. From when you first came in, I mean.”

“Oh,” I said, stupidly. “Yes, I mean. Thank you.” When I looked at my food and coffee, almost like I was going to confirm they were still there, I realized I had not touched my food. I picked up my fork and made my best attempt at eating, even if everything suddenly felt like cement in my mouth and chewing the most disgusting chore I had ever been given. I couldn’t taste a thing and swallowed when I could no longer bear it. She turned around again, not saying a word, and placed my receipt next to my coffee with the pen balanced on top like an afterthought. 

For a while, I could only stare at it. My coffee was lukewarm at best now, dregs in the bottom of the mug oily and bitter. The entire bar felt absurdly big, and I looked from end to end, over and over again, head swiveling, as I pictured every seat full– elbows knocking, plates nearly on top of each other. The newspaper clippings on the wall mocked me. Longest bar in the country. It almost made me sick. On the windows, there was a fine mist of water from rain I had never noticed. I thought of dragging my tongue across the smooth glass, licking it all up. 

I picked up the receipt; turned it over in my hands. For a split second, I assumed there would be something written: a note, a phone number, a lopsided smiling face on the corner.  All the math– the total, the numbers– were there, and nothing else. For a second, I just held the plain black pen, tapping the end against my knuckles. There was an impulse– not a loud one, more like the kind that sneaks up on you when you’re half asleep and at your weakest– to write something down. To explain something or thank her or ask her to run away with me. I could picture it all in the time it took for me to blink; every second a vignette in our lives. When I focused for long enough to draft whatever this message was going to be, it all left me at once, leaving only the vague sensation that anything I said wouldn’t be enough. I didn’t want to go to mass or meet anyone’s mother.

Still, I uncapped the pen and wrote anyway; scrawl on the back of the receipt, quick and jagged. I left my phone number. I didn’t read it over. I stretched my toes in my shoe; flexed the arch of my foot. In a flurry, I left the bill and her tip placed neatly in the clip of the pen, stood noisily, and waited for her parting words. 

“Take care.” And there they were. I watched the fluorescent lights dance on the silver of her piercing. I thought about leaning forward and kissing her. I tongued the back of my teeth like the action would unstick every word there. I felt a bead of sweat roll down the crevice of my underarm and drip towards my belt. I considered asking her if she was religious, and if she believed in god, and if she wanted to be a Robinson’s waitress when she was a little girl. 

All of this culminated in a “thanks” that sounded like it was coming from miles away. She would call, I figured. 

On the walk home, it snowed. All of the flakes made it to the ground before melting into nothing against the damp slickness of the concrete. It wasn’t enough to soak through my coat, but it clung anyway, heavy and insistent. I realized, halfway to my house and paused on the old freight bridge, that I had forgotten to leave the receipt at Robinson’s entirely. In my pocket, I flicked my finger on the corner of the damp paper, over and over. When I took it out to confirm it was the receipt at all, the ink on the back had smudged so severely it was completely illegible.

I let it fall out of my hand and plummet to its death onto soaked steel. My eyes stayed on it until the water ate it up; leaving it translucent and one with the tracks. I spit on it for good measure, put my hands in my pockets, and kept walking.