Chapter 2

I woke up the following morning with a splitting headache, the origin of which I couldn't fully explain. I didn't really drink anything the previous night and one would think I would be used to the reverberations of the speakers behind me. None-the-less even the slightest bit of light, even the smallest of sounds sent my head spiraling into a fit of pain. I flopped out of my bed with the grace of a newborn calf only to find myself tumbling into a pile of clothing. My mornings usually transpired this way; even without my splitting headache I was about as useful as a vegetative accident victim and about as coherent. I stared into the mirror in front of me, my daily routine, trying to get my alien limbs to listen to the incoherent murmurings of my brain. The past night was the last thought on my mind, if I even had a thought further than my basic needs. I might not have even brushed my teeth had it not been ingrained in my mind since childhood. I stood there for a great while, just staring at the unshaven man that stared back at me. He was all skin and bones this man, any trace of muscle probably melted away with his current habits. Those glazed-over eyes didn't do much of anything except stare back at me, not even watching when the razor slid over his ivory skin.

"Mother fuck!" I shouted, finally grasping what had just happened. Suppose it was the hot liquid dripping down my chin that finally woke me from my zombielike state.

I made my way downstairs still pulling a shirt over my head and around my torso. The usual scene met my eye, my aunt Mina and my mother sitting lazily on the couch passing a bottle of vodka back and forth, cigarettes still smoldering in the ashtray between them. It was funny how they seemed to wonder where I had accumulated my smoking habit from.

"Isn't it a bit early to be drinking?" I questioned, crossing the living room and picking up a half-smoked cigarette from the tray. Of course when I looked up to see if my question had registered any sort of reaction, she had that puzzled look spilled over her features, like she suddenly couldn't understand English. Bringing the end to my lips and inhaling I murmured a slight curse under my breath, plopping myself down on the armchair. "Mother," I paused, again she feigned that she had no idea what I was saying. "Come now stop that, we both know you're a god damn American."

"No, no English! No English!" she bellowed, turning to her sister and they both seemed to laugh in unison. Maybe if I was a five year old this would have been cute, or at least slight amusing, but at the moment all I could do was scowl at the pair and make my way into the kitchen. They were supposed to be a bloody example for me, at least that's what all the after school television shows preached. Your parents should have taught you better, or some nonsense like that. I never grew up with any of that motherly love crap and I turned out just fine. Well, alright fine relatively speaking. I'm not a gangbanger or anything. Though I guess I'm just the mature one in my family. Out of the three of us I was always the one having to take care of them when they had hangovers, make sure they paid their bills on time, and practically kept their diner running when aunt Mina was going through some 'difficult times'. Suppose after nineteen years I've grown weary of their crap. Maybe if I moved out they'd grow up, but they probably wouldn't. They'd get themselves into trouble and there'd be no one to take care of them when they fell out of it.

Though I hated them sometimes, I understood why they did what they did. Why they were the unbelievable drunkards that they were, why they got into bar fights that only ended up with more and more money going into the federal police system, and why they made it a habit to never have a full grip on reality. Reality had done them absolutely no good so why should they invest their time in believing in it? Reality gave my mother a teenage pregnancy, a bastard child, a country full of turmoil and a life of barely scraping by. The best thing that had happened in her life was opening that diner, and she couldn't have done it without my Aunt Mina's help. She claims that she doesn't regret any of it, but I'm not sure if that's just drunken mother talk or if she's being completely sincere. My Aunt Mina's story is just as tragic as my mother's, and suppose that's why she never talks about it. Mina isn't really my blood relative; she's more or less my mother's best friend since they both were in the orphanage. Her brother, Mikhail, was gunned down not too long after they graduated high school, which left my aunt all messed up. My mother had to take care of her for a while after that, and soon the two just decided that she should move in. This meant that I had to take care of the two raging alcoholics.

Either way I needed to get out of that house. The walls were closing in on me again, like they did when I was a young boy having to deal with their shit, and the room was steadily loosing oxygen. If I didn't leave it would collapse upon me and I'd be as flat as one of those cartoon villains. Grabbing my coat and my house keys I made my way out of the back door, the screen slamming closed behind me. I didn't bother shutting the front door, I wasn't going to be out for long and with the way those two were acting, and my mother and aunt wouldn't even notice that the door was open. The cold air hit me the way it always did, with a mix of gratitude and grief. We had a love-hate relationship, the cold and I, and I wouldn't trade that for anything in the world. As I made my way down the early morning street I watched the white collar Joes cleaning the freshly fallen snow from their company cars, and I couldn't help but wonder what that felt like. What it felt like to have such a cookie cutter job, to wake up every morning knowing that you had to do the same bullshit you had to do every other day. The idea was something I really couldn't fathom. Rigid routines were for children learning their place in the greater society, a society I had no real ties to. I hated the mundane, the obvious, that life high-school counselors always pushed you towards, and anything that had anything to do with the corporate America. In my mind I was rebelling against some higher society that I wanted no part of, yet I was conforming to it's ideals without even knowing any better.

Snow crunched underneath my Chuck Taylors as I flicked the rest of my cigarette into the melting snow. It was getting warmer by the day, something many New Yorkers knew as a cruel trick. In the time passing between winter and spring we know all too well that a warm day would only last for a few days, a week tops, before the temperature plummeted again. Of course it'd be nice if for once the temperature stayed nice and even, not like some bipolar teenage binge. My mind was drifting somewhere else as the apartment buildings started to blur into the drab city backdrop. It wasn't exactly like a moving picture like most daydreams are, nor was it really fragmented. It felt almost like a flashback, like it had happened before. But then that's how most of my daydreams appeared to me lately and I'm not one to jump on the suspicion bandwagon and make something of these daydreams that there really isn't.