I have always found it fascinating how the world is different when my face is in a toilet just after a night of Frankford Avenue drinking and just before the crying starts. Maybe it's all in how I must appear to my imagined audience. It's a fantastic image, perhaps a bit hackneyed, but wonderful in its parts, the physical and the symbolic. Let's start with the tangible: the blurry vision, tears blanketing eyes like afghans over lovers during winter nights in Maine, and the gagging, that gagging on the smell of old water and cleanser. Oh, the smell. It does so well to induce sickness into a waiting bowl, bad porcelain lips not unlike Bernini's Embrace, welcoming you to the Vatican. I like to blame the smell. It's always been the smell.

As for the metaphor, well, there's the purging aspect, I suppose. The idea that your body has decided to reject itself, so to speak, and that vulnerability. I believe that's what it is—that feeling of defeat when you've collapsed on the tile feeling like a child once again, only very drunk and also alone because this is when everyone else sleeps.

As much as I can, I clean myself up and decide to head upstairs. I'm glad that I had the presence of mind to utilize the basement bathroom. I certainly would have woken someone up had I used the 2nd floor bathroom, which is directly adjacent to my parents' bedroom. I notice that no vomit has gotten on my clothes. I believe I deserve points for accuracy. A point system, I feel, would be beneficial. I would have something to shoot for, because otherwise this is the life of a grown-up child sleeping in the bed he grew up in. There needs to be subtle nuances to the deal, especially now that I have done well. When it is time for the laundry to be done later in the week, no mysterious stain or blemish will have to be explained, allowing me to maintain a guise of maturity or self-control, hiding the awful truth of the situation, this typical outcome, this indictment of character.

I step outside the front door to have a cigarette before I pass out. I numbly fumble for the pack I purchased at the new Wawa at Gilliam and Frankford. I should probably confess something. I think I hate Wawa. I think I hate the white walls, I think too many kids I grew up with work in one, I think they overcharge for Newports. They don't sell looseys, and the consistency of the iced tea, to be honest, is reminiscent of water sucked down from a hose left at G and Luzerne. But this Wawa was new and open and that's more than I can say about most things in Mayfair.

I sit down on the steps and carefully watch the clouds of smoke that I exhale. I follow them with my eyes, as I often do, because I have found that they always seem to rise the same way. That is, the path that the smoke cloud travels is surprisingly constant—upward, of course, but very straight, very direct, regardless of wind or air pressure or dew point, which any meteorologist worth his salt will tell you can fluctuate wildly and have far-reaching effects on local weather patterns.

The shapes of the clouds, however, are a different story. I can never predict the shapes. Sometimes I try to exert as much control over the situation as I can—I'll purse my lips to create a narrow streak, or I'll simply open my mouth as wide as possible so the smoke can billow forward like it is being born from the handsome chimney of a log cabin. A real nice cabin, too, the kind they put on maple syrup labels. Tonight the clouds ascend in imperfect spheres, small helium balloons that look shockingly grey against the familiar black skyline, a sky lined lonely: the dark profile of row homes reaching out of sight, the occasional vacant lot, street corners hugging still-hot asphalt, beds of broken glass crying out under tires but inaudible over sirens. This happens all the time but we've all learned to sleep through it.

At least that's how I'll describe it when I go back to school, when I'm talking to Ashley or Christie or Katie from Lansdale or Holland and who went to Villa or probably Conestoga. I will tell her that I was a latch-key kid, all my friends are cops and plumbers, and she will show me her pastel underwear.

Christ, again with the crying.