Someday Never Comes

Chapter Five

I woke to a stiff neck and a ray of light that was trying to sear the skin off my eyes. Groaning and muttering obscenities at the death beam, I cracked my cemented lids.

Two facts became immediately clear.

Firstly, all of my potential rides were gone, their sleeping bags abandoned. Second and more importantly, I had clearly lost my goddamn mind.

Oh the revelations a few uninterrupted hours of sleep could bring.

Sitting stunned on the hard floor, sleeping bag bunched up around my knees, the insanity of what I'd done suddenly struck home. The previous forty-eight hours were replaying in my head, captured in flashes like a bad TV recap. I'd come home from the hearing and paused just long enough to pen a jumbled resignation letter at the kitchen counter, had stopped at the apartment office on my way back from the mailbox and terminated my lease. What had brought me from that moment, to my current position in a ramshackle old church in Colorado, was hazy. The memories held sight and sound but no real sense of being. I felt disconnect from them; as if the past fews days were a movie I'd watched or a half remembered dream.

Hazy or not though, the end result was clear enough. I'd had some kind of extended nervous breakdown (did they still even call them that?) and scuttled, in the space of four days, the life and career I'd spent the last sixteen years building.

I pressed my forehead to my bent knees, hit by a wave of mental vertigo.

I wanted to hit something (preferably myself). I wanted to roll back over, go to sleep and wake up in the real world- in a reality where I hadn't dropped my basket and hit the big red self destruct button on my life.

The sound of movement in a nearby room brought me back around. Someone was bustling around down the hall, feet crossing and recrossing squeaky floorboards and it occurred to me that if I was going to have any hope of hitching a ride out of the land that time forgot, I'd better stop panicking and get my ass in gear. Throwing off the sleeping bag, I hurriedly rolled it up and yanked on my boots before I went in search of the noise's source.

Instead of the trucker I'd been hoping for, I discovered Pastor Riggs. She was scurrying around a small office, re-shelving books and shuffling photocopied flyers, full of the same nervous rodent energy I'd observed the night before. When I tapped on the doorframe, she looked up with a start.

"Shit, sorry," I said, afraid that I'd given the old girl a heart attack.

"Oh that's alright honey." 

It didn't look alright. She was clutching a hand to her sternum like someone who expected their lungs to make a break for it.

"You sleep okay?" she asked, patting her hair with the hand not still trying to hold her ribcage together.

"Yeah, it was-" reality altering. "Really kind of you to let me camp out like that."

She waved her hand dismissively. "Ain't no trouble."

"Hey, speaking of? The other guys that stayed here last night, are they still around?"

"Gone before sunup."

"Damn," I said and then colored. I needed to stop swearing in front of a- whatever it was that pastors were. "Any chance I could impose a little further and borrow a phone? I left mine in my vehicle last night and I need to find someone who does auto glass repair."

"Course." She motioned to the wall. "Phonebook's in the drawer right under." Smiling placidly at me, she picked up a scissors and set to work attacking the stack of flyers.