Yesterday, the day after the day where you were most afraid the worst could happen, was Try To Put Yourself Back Together Day. On Try To Put Yourself Back Together Day you wake up, and your body feels like cardboard that will not bend or yield. Somehow, you find a dress and some sandals. And look at that! You even found a cardigan. Hold on a minute … must shower, and so you do, for the bare minimum amount of time to be considered clean. Now you can pull on the dress, fall into the sandals, and pull on the cardigan with a double check to make sure it is not on inside-out. Oh, yes, don’t forget to twist your hair up into a a hair clip.

Mercifully, your day at work is a half day. You get through it, actually it’s a strange godsend to go to work. You love the feeling of semi-normality as you discuss the performance evaluation of an employee with a supervisor. Inside you are internally incredulous. “How is it that I can do this? I look and sound normal, and even get the job done well, but the deepest inside of me is in dissociative hell.”

A few more emails to answer at your desk, and you then head out for the day. You head to a coffee shop to take a final exam online. Done. But then you realize that you have to go home, and you feel yourself start to slip away again. You call your friend, David, and he invites you to come over to his place. He reminds you that you need to eat something, so you stop at the bakery to get half priced baked goods since it’s closing time for them. You get a quiche for yourself, a cinnamon roll for him, and vanilla pound cake just to have on hand.

He saved a George Lopez HBO comedy special for you on his DVR months ago for an occasion just like this. You watch it in that sleepy, drifty mode of yours that feels almost like drunken sleep. In that sleepy state you hear “órale! órale!” from the television screen. It’s George’s forever rallying cry. But, you don’t quite drift off because David has it in his head to show you this week’s episode of Real Time with Bill Maher, which thrills you because, not having HBO, you’ve not had opportunity to ever see it. You drift off as one of your personal heroes, Simone Campbell, of Nuns on the Bus, is on the show. Such sweet serendipity.

You wind up falling asleep there for the night. Somehow the sofa bed is rolled out, and you wake up with sheets and a blanket on you.

The ick of a nasty nonsensical nightmare with a kidnapping, a helmet, and a roaring train wakes you up with a start. David hears you wake up from his bedroom. He comes out to cut up the vanilla pound cake for your breakfast. He serves you seltzer that is at least two years old because he cannot waste anything.

After all these years, you never really paid any attention to his sound system. He starts to explain to you the intricacies of 5.1 surround sound. You ask to listen to some classical music to try out the sound system, and you find a Weber symphony by the London Classical Players. And it sounds pristine. You would have paid admission for that lovely sound. Later on, he further shows off the surround sound by showing you the sound quality with a game of quidditch from the first Harry Potter movie. He tries to convince you that Star Wars is best for the sound system, but Star Wars always bored you.

But when he’s done he is done, and you get the idea that it is time to leave. After all, you did spend the night. You are still in the same clothes from yesterday. You find a hair band, and you put your hair up. You can tell that you are sweaty, and could use a shower, but you are afraid to go home and lose time. Home is such a black hole of lost time for you. You drive to the tea shop, and order a Matcha Green Tea Latte with Coconut Milk, and the paradox of sitting there with that fancy drink in day old sweaty clothes, and a greasy face is a tiny scrap of humor in the eternal struggle to not drift away. Looking out the open window of the tea shop with a slight breeze, you then realize that it’s the next day of Try To Put Yourself Back Together Day.