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Thursday, January 12, 2012

One Night Stand?

One Night Stand?
by
Brandon Dues


You just wake up in a room. It’s never the your own. Always someone else’s. You look around for clues to sort of piece together the last 12 hours. It’s all a mystery to you. You try to get up at your normal speed but you forget to account for the alcohol in your system and end up stumbling over. What you previously thought were bed sheets are actually fibers from the shag rug that you thought would be a good idea to sleep on. As you (slowly) bring yourself up to an upright position, you notice a woman. Unlike you the mystery woman you most likely had sex with decided to fall asleep on a more comfortable structure. She starts to come to. You vaguely remember her from the night before. She was a lot more attractive then. You contemplate faking that your asleep but you’re reaction time is still a bit off. You lock eyes and keep them there for what seems like an eternity as you try to remember her name. The awkwardness of the whole situation becomes too much and you smile and wave as if you were doing some sort of meet and greet. She ask you “What are you doing on the floor”. Unable to come up with a valid excuse or anecdote you tell her the truth. “What do you mean you don’t know” she replies. You now have a witty response. You tell her. She laughs but you feel it was only to humor you. You are now faced with a very long and almost deafening silence. You try to come up with another witty retort to break the silence but by the time this happens she lays back down. Before she falls back asleep she beckons you to come back to bed. The funny things about this is you don’t remember being in bed in the first place. As you look around, the evidence proves otherwise. It’s only now you realize you’re completely naked and the only thing separating your dangling participle from the outside world is a woman’s tank top. You sit there for minutes contemplating your next move. In your current state, relocating your clothes will take more effort than taking the mystery woman up on her offer. It seems a bit rude to you to use this stranger’s tank top as a loin cloth, so, you use every ounce of strength to remember where you placed your undergarments. By some miracle, you actually remember. You cast the tank top aside and make your way towards the bathroom. You cove up by cupping your genitals in your hands. You laugh at yourself for being a walking cliché. As you retrieve your underwear from the bathroom sink you catch a glimpse of yourself in the mirror. Your eyes are bloodshot and your breath smells like the inside of a ashtray. . .soaked in gin. There is an outside chance that you may revisit a sexual encounter with the mystery woman sometime in the next hour. The idea of morning sex intrigues you, so, you decide to freshen up. You notice that there is a bottle of mouth wash on the bathroom counter. You uncap the mouthwash as discreetly as possible and take a couple of swigs. During this time, you remember that you have to urinate. You try kill two birds with one stone by taking the longest piss of your life and somewhat freshening your breath but the mouth wash is a bit too strong for you and spit it out all over her mirror. You make your way back to the strange woman’s bed. On your way, you stumble on something you assume is a high heel boot. As you pull her comforter over and settle in, you notice two things. 1) This woman is completely naked and 2) Something seems a bit off about this whole situation. You don’t remember her hair being that color. When you initially woke up her hair was blonde. Now, her hair looks as if it has a reddish tint. You brush it aside and blame it on the alcohol. As you lay down and ponder the best way to inquire about another round of sex, something else seems a bit off. The shape of the blanket has changed. . . When you pulled it over a moment ago it had rounded edges. Now, the edges are squared. For some reason this doesn’t disturb you as it should. You tell yourself that this will all make sense when you wake up. You abandon the idea of mid-morning coitus in favor of a couple more hours of sleep. You move closer to the naked mystery woman and embrace in a standard spooning position. It’s only when you finally fall asleep that you realize why everything was a bit off. . . Why her hair changed color. Why the edges of the comforter were different. You open your eyes and notice that the mystery woman has disappeared. Her belongings have disappeared as well and are replaced by your own. You slowly put together the pieces. The reason you couldn’t remember anything from the night before wasn’t because of the alcohol, even though you had plenty, it was because it never happened. The last twelve hours are a mystery because all of your days seem to run together at this point. The mystery woman that you most likely slept with wasn’t a mystery at all. In fact, you knew her. Well, you did at one point but now she’s changed more than you can keep up with. You slept on the floor because you couldn’t stand sleeping alone. You even tried to make it different by purchasing a new comforter. It never worked. Hence, why you continually decide to sleep on the floor. Your eyes were red because you spent the better part of the evening weeping into the only thing she left behind, her tank top. Everything that “occurred” last night wasn’t real. It was all just a fantasy scenario that you cooked up in your drunken, depressed, and heartbroken state of mind. The truth is that she left because you tried to kill to birds with one stone but ended up just pissing your life away. The truth is she’s gone and she’s never coming back. It’s never someone else’s room. It’s always your room. It’s always going to be your room. . .until you decide to move on.

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