Gestalt 2 - Jacob Saltzman 'Walter'

I woke up. I looked at my hands for several minutes. I looked away. The blinking clock read 12:00.

My bed was empty, except for me. I laid there for a while longer, then I got up, though the emptiness tried to keep me there alongside it.

I was at the mirror in the bathroom. I stared at it for a while wondering if such a man really exists.

“Which of us is more real?” I said to myself, the one in the mirror.

He asked me the same question. Neither of us could answer. Perhaps we were both too scared that it was he who was not real at all.

Now I peed, looked down and generally thought that I should stop drinking such exorbitant amounts of alcohol. Fragmentary remembrance pieces of the previous night barraged my brain. They flashed into existence and I felt them. It seemed like they were inside my skull at war with one another. Explosions now occurred reminding me of the text messages I had sent my ex-girlfriend at the peak of my inebriation which were an affront to her and her new lover’s existence and were in a bastardized form of the English language involving many capitalized letters and curse words.

I think I flushed the toilet and put the lid down, but I am not sure. Now I was in the kitchen holding a cold carton of milk. I poured it over my cereal. I went to put the milk away in the cupboard, corrected myself, put it in the fridge, and then I laughed at myself to myself. Subconsciously my hand took the spoon and used it to dunk the cereal islands into the milky ocean.

Out the window I saw a cute looking couple walk by. As I mashed my breakfast between my teeth a daydream popped into my war-ravaged head. In that instant I was a giant and I was flicking people like paper footballs. Now, the tip of my left index finger held the guy’s head while the middle finger of my right hand was tensely pushing against the thumb of the same hand. The thumb gave way, and the middle finger swung out and struck the little man at such a velocity that he simply burst and out from him came all sorts of streamers and balloons, most of which floated up and up and out of view. I saw it all evaporate into blue when it got too high and it was beautiful, and I felt great. But as I brought my eyes back downwards I found the girl there, crying, on her knees, where she scooped up a pile of the party supplies and held them to her chest. From her mouth the most disturbing cry emerged.

My cell phone chimed at that exact moment waking me out of that awful world. It was a text message from a friend asking if I wanted to get coffee. I replied that I did.