Existential Hangover

The morning sun beat down on his bed as if attached to a fire house siren inside a continuous thunder clap. Gooey throbs of pain pulsed at his temples in different intervals allowing no girding; only wincing ex post facto. His barren mouth yenned for liquid but that would require movement and movement increased the pain –everywhere. His pulse could be found in his throat driving straight up and out of his skull bending his brain and shoving it out of the way for escape. He was stuck in the fetal position as this seemed to be the safest position, something about going back to how you were in the womb was obvious. Here he would stay for another 6 hours, motionless but fiercely battling alcohol poisoning. 

After six hours he could move and he needed to as now the vomiting commenced. A white hot retch after retch above a cold, calculating orifice was his price. While the old pains waved and beat in his body like a flag in a storm, a new more physical, structural, in-the-bones pain surfaced, burning his throat and punching his abdomen and back retch after retch, heave after heave. Blood began to show in the vomit, at first droplets, followed by splotches, puddling into half cups in the desecrated water. He’d been sick before but never this much blood before. At last retch, only blood spewed from his mouth leaving a heinous blood film on his teeth, the taste there, in his mouth, like some horrible infinite regress. 

He could have called 911. He probably should have called 911. Didn’t they say that time heals all wounds or was it that time wounds all heals? This tautology, this axiom, this objective truth melding into a nihilism in his body, born from fermentation, from rotting, from time (there it is again) could not be outstripped. He could not fallacy his way out of it, there was no cognitive dissonance, and there was no forced dichotomy to appeal to, for help. There was death from the poison or there was recovery, then death. The variable was time.