When you blur through life staring down the bottom of a glass, reality fades, what once made sense as common, logical, or ideal suddenly becomes a mountain of rue or an ocean of sorrow. Too much time had elapsed since I'd seen her; I started doubting what she looks like, which, before my choice to crawl inside a bottle, would've been impossible, it was one of the things my eidetic memory wouldn't let me forget. I could still smell the over-the-top sun tan lotion glazing her perfect body and taste the overpriced stale martinis she loved sipping on. It'd been so long since I felt her warmth that not even this hell was hot enough for me; if only things were that simple. In a town full of drunks, dolled-up bimbos, bros, poseurs and bullshit artists, I was the floorshow, trying to drink her away at the end of the bar like some grumpy old man who’d been to war and returned a changed man; some wars are fought on the inside.

It wouldn't be the first time I’d come to with a migraine long after the party had decayed. She was missing, my vision glided to eternal focus as I meagerly searched for her essence, it took a while before I realized she was already gone. I lapsed time, lost track of it, it was like needing a bottle of wake-up scotch after a 4-day bender to floor you to reality. When all you’re left with is questions, your only choice is to go with your gut, and my gut was telling me she'd have the answers, answers I'd wish I'd never get soon enough. Simple human nature: might as well burn up in the blazing sun than freeze under the cold moon.

A history of irascibility and a sullen isolation of anything lacking her touch, I ran around like some 90s action hero trying to save ill-fated honeys…it was either a stroke of genius or complete and utter stupidity; I’d decide which later.

I'd been sitting across this bottle of Walker Gold for 45 minutes, or three years depending whom you ask. I didn't ask; I didn't want to know how my existence became less about the things that others live for, and more about the voids that losing such things leaves behind, but I was doing a crappy job of it…

People think time is linear, but the only people who are more wrong than those people are the idiots who believe in some invisible bearded white man in the sky who has foretold their stories in all time, in every single quantum timeline. His tests are stupid-at-best since the concept of such a being must include within it the knowledge of your passing or failing, and if that's true, then why bother with the test in the first place? It'd be like writing a test after you've gotten your grades. Even a simple temporal movement forward would be impossible for this thing; he can’t ever watch the useless seconds tick away when he’s resting, which with the state the world’s in, must be all the time.

It's us that perceives time to move forward, but as experience taught me, time may very well slow down, pause, or rewind altogether; I lived in the past, my feeble perceptions of things remembered were all I knew of life, of death, of lamentations, and the abyss I'd gazed into at the bottom of that same golden bottle. Hume would be impressed, maybe even Kant and Einstein too. Great…there's my noble deed of the day, impressing the nonexistent dead souls of archaic philosophers who knew very little and did even less. Where was I? Oh yes, about to feel golden about myself.

Eye in Eye; Edvard Munch; 1894; Oil on canvas; 136 x 110 cm; The Munch Museum — *Eye in Eye*; Edvard Munch; 1894; Oil on canvas; 136 x 110 cm; The Munch Museum