The Map That Leads to You

by J.P. Monninger

I took a deep breath, wondering why we are sometimes willing to tell secrets to strangers on trains that we would never tell to anyone else. I went ahead, anyway.

“Weltschmerz,” I said, feeling the heaviness of the word as it passed my lips. “German for world weariness and pain. It’s the idea that physical reality can never meet the demands of the mind. I researched it for a paper my sophomore year. I remembered it because it kind of describes these moods I sometimes get.” “Welt…?” he asked. “Weltschmerz. Unnamed dread and fatigue of the world. That’s the definition.”

“Of course it’s crazy. Everything is crazy. The whole world is crazy. Didn’t you know that, Heather? Didn’t you know everyone is an imposter and there are no real adults in the next room?”

“You cannot pay for this. Not young people like you. This is a gift. They say it is made of angel tears. You understand?” “I do,” I answered. “Good drinks are always sad. They bring us life, but they also remind us of dead. You agree?”

you hear hoofbeats, assume horses, not zebras,” Raef said. “Isn’t that the phrase?” “If you hear hoofbeats, assume unicorns,” Constance said, bringing her eyes up to look at each of us. “That’s the way to live.”

I’m not a dead end you need to avoid. You know where the real prison is? It’s in your mind. It’s in your head. We live in our heads, Jack, and you can travel your legs off, but you’re still going to be right inside your brain when the day is done.

The bad drunks, the ones that get you in trouble, are the ones that sneak up on you. If you set out to get drunk, then you go at things with a plan in mind, a pacing that a sneaky drunk slyly slips around. During a sneaky drunk, you start with a drink, maybe in the afternoon, and one thing leads to another, and maybe you haven’t eaten enough, at least not enough for the kind of drinking you are about to engage in, and before long you are drunker than you should be, sloshy, and because you haven’t planned for the drunkenness, it seems like a pleasing surprise, an unexpected guest, and you keep offering more drinks to this visitor, delighted to find yourself in a state of glow when you hadn’t even meant to have more than one.