The Summer I Died

by Ryan C. Thomas

Shit. In my book, listening to a drunk get philosophical is on par with rolling down a hill in a barrel full of nails. You get dizzy, your insides shriek with stabbing pain, and you end up someplace lower than where you started.

You said you want to draw comics. Having a degree isn’t going to accomplish that. All it’s gonna do is get you nice little cubicle next to someone else’s nice little cubicle, where the two of you will swap family photos and talk about how cute your kids’ poopie is. You don’t need to study economics to get a job drawing Batman. You just need a pencil and paper and the know-how to draw a fucking cape and horns and—voila! —you’re living your dream.”

I guess some problems were too big to fix and you just hoped they would take care of themselves.

The Camaro rumbled down the road like a metallic fart with a purpose.

The drug wasted no time climbing into the recesses of my mind and convincing my brain cells they could run the place with minimal staff.

You don’t just concede defeat in these circumstances. You take every second you can find and use it to pray for another few seconds. Hope is a cruel bitch.

The human brain has a difficult time rationalizing the absurd. It’s like watching aliens land in your backyard and take a dip in your pool. You think, “This is a dream, any moment now I’ll wake up.” And then you do wake up. And you laugh about it and go back to sleep. Only we weren’t waking up.

Life really is amazing, and when you’re about to lose it, you finally notice that you never really took it in before. And you realize the sheer magnitude of what it involves, from your first kiss to your hundredth slice of pizza. I guess that’s why those tears drifted down my cheeks.

This is what I thought about as I lay in that hospital bed, day after day after day. This is what I still think about, as I fight to stay awake most nights, as I try to avoid the nightmares of that summer, pinching myself to ward off sleep. My purpose. All of our purposes. The afterlife. God. Why I am still alive, and why the dice never rolled my number, and why I had even taken them to begin with. I think about superheroes and villains, about good and evil, about strong and weak, always wondering what it means for me. And I think about that other thing, which makes it all the more confusing and urgent. And yet, makes it all make sense, somehow. When they dug up Tooth’s body, he was wearing his Red Sox cap.