I stand in line to refill my red, plastic cup with the brown, frothy poison for the fourth time. The kid in front of me pumps the tap up and down, down and up, causing the filth to erupt into the bottom of his cup. He hands me a black hose poking through jagged valleys of ice. I push the lever down, and venom pours into my cup like a lethal snakebite traveling to the heart. By the time the liquid reaches the top, it is barely a dribble, like someone placed a tourniquet around the hose.
    I walk through a haze of smoke, mostly cigarette but some illegal, and sit down on a couch next to some girls playing the drinking game—a circle of death. They ask if I want to play, and they tell me how. Each card you pick out of the circle of facedown cards represents how and how much you have to drink. A nine is picked and everyone has to rhyme, the person that breaks the chain has to drink. A six is drawn, six is dicks, guys drink. An ace is randomly pulled, which is waterfall—you drink until the person in front of you stops. Half of my drink is gone by now. I put it down on the table and walk away.

    The door is locked. I sit on the bed and wait. The sheets are disheveled, perhaps from a couple recently having sex. This is my friend’s bed, his party, and the only one I know here. There are green bottles of Jagermeister lining the windowsill. A girl is sitting at the computer playing on myspace—we are the myspace generation. Countless hours spent on this website—dating, friends, fucking, and popularity. Popularity for sitting behind a computer alone in your room, alone in a room at a party. Decay your mind, eyes, and soul.
    Two girls stumble out of the bathroom, snorting as if their noses were stuffed. Their eyes are red and glazed over. They giggle as they pass me. Hygiene products are knocked into the sink, and there is a white, powdery residue on the counter.

    I return to the couch. A blonde girl tells me to pick a card. I choose a king, which is apparently the fourth one, meaning I have to finish my drink. I grab the cup closest to me and drain it.
    – Go get some more, they tell me.
    – I’m done for the night, I tell them, I’m driving home in a few hours.
    My uncle is a drunk and I don’t drink too often because I fear becoming like him. The girls call me lame and forget about me just as quickly. I typically don’t attend these kinds of parties; I never know what to say. Even being tipsy doesn’t help.
    I walk out to the balcony to clear my senses. An arctic, Floridian wind stings my eyes as it assaults my face. I don’t have a jacket on. There are about five or six other people out here. I don’t know any of them. A girl with red hair is sitting in a guy’s lap, their tongues become one. The other three, sitting in a circle, are smoking out of a bong made from a water bottle.
    All of a sudden everything starts spinning. It is like I’m on the carnival ride, The Vortex, but not strapped to the side. Oh god, I’m the drunk one passing out. This isn’t me, I’ve never been the drunk one. I’ve been drunk and high before, but this is unlike anything that I have ever experienced. I sit down for fear that I will fall over and hurt myself. Everything spins faster and faster. Something is wrong. At the same time, everything around me starts to get slower and slower, yet my world is still running in circles around my head. My eyes begin to flutter, and I can no longer keep them open. I try to grab someone’s attention, but all that comes out is a moan. I try to move but fall over into a ball. I cannot voluntarily move any of my limbs.

    – Who comes to a party and goes to sleep on a balcony, someone says.
    Everyone around me laughs.
    – He just drank too much, someone adds, he’s fine. Let him be.
    – Should we move him out of the cold?
    – Nah, he’ll be fine.
    – No, I’m not fine. Help me! I yell.
    No one hears me. It is like I am encased in a foot-thick cement wall. I speak in my mind, but my mouth doesn’t move. I try to move but nothing happens. Everyone thinks I am either unconscious or sleeping. Are coma patients this aware of everything around them but unable to respond? I feel a pressure building in my throat. Liquid erupts from my mouth. The world around me starts to rupture. I can feel the warm liquid on my cheek as I lie in my vomit. I’m swallowing my tongue. It is like something is pushing down on my chest, preventing me from breathing. Each labored breath is gurgled with a sea of venom. My arm starts twitching. I don’t know if it is from the cold or from the convulsing. Everything becomes distant.

    Is this what it feels like to die? If I let go, will that be it? Or will I just pass out and wake up later? Does anyone even know the difference when everything is black and fading away? I have read many near-death experiences, written by a variety of talented writers. Are their transcendental testimonials true, or were they influenced by what is commonly thought of as dying—the typical white light at the end of the tunnel syndrome? This is nothing like what they told us. It feels as if life is slipping away, and I just want to let it go and never look back. To hide in the darkness forever, never having to struggle. Just let it go. Just let it be. But I am too afraid to let go.

Someone shakes me like a maraca.
The beads inside me dance.
A hand slaps my cheek, a tickle to my sense.
Hey buddy, wake up. Does anyone know him?
People mutter ‘no’ in accordance,
I am lifted into the sky, into the clouds.
I don’t like heights,
The clouds are cold and wet.

Stop.

I am falling, falling in a chair
Where me and my arm are slumped
Over the chair’s arm, swaying and twitching.
I am Atlas reborn, carrying the world
Upon my shoulders, so careful not to move
For fear of dropping and ruining everything.
So much pressure, pressure pushing me down.
If only I could move, moving seems so foreign.

The voices around me weaken,
Become distant, and end.
I am left with only the quiet.
Everything ceases to be.

    The black chariot has come to deliver me. I bounce up and down. Then everything stops. Everything is silent. Do we just end or are we taken to a higher plane of existence? Can we become the skittish squirrel or valiant lion that we were in life—reincarnation? I am in an oasis. Beauty is everywhere—in the sand, in the water, in the snow that should not be there, and in every cell of every leaf dangling from every tree. My mind is a blank chalkboard waiting to filled, erased, and rewritten. Everything turns white. A brilliant, blinding, and burning white. Blurry and tearing white. I am being thrown onto burning coals. I see a hand, and my board is erased.

    I open my eyes. I lift my head. I move my arms and sit up. It feels as if my muscles melted. Everything is blurry. I am sitting in a hospital room with vomit caked on my arm. I look up at the clock and it looks like it reads 6:01, but I cannot tell for sure because my glasses are missing. Did that much time go by? It felt like only an hour. Four hours of my life are unaccounted for.
    A nurse walks in:
    – Good, you’re up.
    – What, what happened to me? I barely spit out while coughing.
    – You overdosed on PCP, she says while not looking up from her chart.
    My heart skips. Did I hear her right?
    – What? That’s impossible. I’ve never taken PCP before.
    – In cases like yours, we don’t test for what we already know you’ve done to yourself. Your behavior was consistent with an overdose of PCP. It would have been a waste of money to spend it on someone like you, money that you probably don’t have.
    The way she emphasized the word you makes me cringe. I’ve smoked some marijuana here and there, but I would never do anything harder than that. It just isn’t worth it. Could I have picked up the one rogue cup that was meant for someone else? Could it have been intended for someone’s night of potential fun? What if a girl had accidentally grabbed it?
    She looks up and surveys me for awhile. Then she looks back down at her chart:
    – You really shouldn’t take drugs. You’ll kill your heart worse than you did tonight, maybe next time you won’t be as lucky.
    She hands me my discharge papers, my personal items and tells me that I am free to go. I try to tell her that I didn’t take anything, but she doesn’t listen and walks out of the room. This is what it is like to be treated like a worthless drug addict. They will make sure that you are healthy enough to go, and then throw you out on the street without even listening to your story. But then again, I guess the story is always the same with people that come in under similar circumstances.
    I search through the bag of my personal items. My glasses aren’t there. I get up and walk through a hallway I have never been in—dazed and very confused. Walking through a blurry fog, it is impossible to know which way to go. I cannot read any of the signs unless I get within two feet of them. I limp down the hallway, my right sandal is missing. Somehow I manage to find the lobby. I sit on a mauve chair, and I’m the only person here aside from the nurse behind the counter. I take out my phone and call my roommate. It rings six times and goes to the answering machine. She is sleeping—it is the crack-of-dawn-early. I call again but she doesn’t pick up. On my third try she answers with a sleepy, muted voice.
    – Hey, I weakly peep out, could you come get me? I’m at the hospital.