1.

"Why do you think you're here?"

"I don't belong here."

Voices, somewhat far away. Just background noise, even though some of it resonates in my own throat. My life flashes past in flickers, images cut from the void. 

Childhood: a warm, sun-like center in a dark universe: happiness with no strings attached, living without needing a reason. These images are blurry as they are bright, rolling and curving and melting into one gold tinted wave.

Next comes elementary school, the pre-alcoholism ears. These are more violent, vivid flashes, jumbling and mixing; scenes truncated and slammed together in no real order. Long division, the texture of dirt when your face is mashed into it, Mrs. Evans my third grade teacher, the woes of cursive, my first girlfriend, discovering curse words, Jesus on a felt board. Everything was simpler then: even the Bible was just one big storybook.

Then came football.

These are, remarkably, the clearest images: they are slower, whole. All my brothers played it, and all my friends, and sometimes we played together. I might have even loved the game, then, because I had the knack for it. "The real talent" my father would say, with the gleam in his eyes I should have recognized as dangerous, but didn't. In my childhood nativity, I thought it was just another game--one I could excel at and quit, like the other games played on the playground. 

I was wrong. The edges of my life began to blur. "The Game" had a beginning, but no end.

Math became 

height + weight + big-fucking-linebacker / my pain threshold= how fast I had to run. English was "Yes, sir" and "No, sir": Art was x's and o's on a blackboard. There was no teacher concerned that sports was taking over my life, hiding my true talent and shit, like the Lifetime movies my mother watched. I passed without trying, wondering if I was dumb and the teachers were bribed or if I had a decent brain in my head.

Begin the alcoholic years, high school for most people: as long as it didn't interfere with The Game everything was fair play. If you drink with a vengeance, everyone's your friend, and you forget how fucking stupid they really are. The warm, happy glow of childhood in a bottle: you sit and laugh and spill on your clothing just like you did when you were little.

Memories in a beer cloud, memories of fresh cut grass and helmets and sweat, and running like hell. Memories of dark roads walked alone with bottle in hand. Memories of sitting around the dining room table, the whole family assembled...but I shy away from those.

But the most recent memory, the one that landed me here in the first place, remains elusive. Flashes of trees whooshing past at enormous speed--my speed, the only speed I know. Legs pumping--my legs--heavy breathing--my lungs on fire--patches of the night sky--have to get out, have to get help, have to run.

So when the man repeats his question "Why do you think you're here?" I have no real answer. I can't explain a culmination of images and short clips on a reel. I open my mouth, but the Brown-Suit beats me to it.

"It's a rhetorical question, boy. You're here to listen." Angry, thin duck lips press together in a hard line. He probably hates his job. I glare at the bald spot floating above a fresh, cornflower blue tie. I vowed to learn how to convey "Fuck You" through listening.

2.

Trays slide and chairs scrape. Arms stretch across empty spaces to fill the blank plastic table. Glares and snickers, and the tops of heads.

Apparently, being fucked up is an exclusive club, on where a football player from a conventional two-parent family is not welcome. After all, even the freaks have standards. Maybe if I wore all black, thought my life was a tragedy and slouched around like I'd just been ass-fucked by my boyfriend I'd fit in. Trays continue to scrape across tabletops, filling the empty seats. Faces ranging from hostile to indifferent stare up at me from their own little life rafts, clumped together in groups of the similarly miserable.

"This seat's free," says one cast away to another, on a small island in a sea of linoleum. I sit.

"Mara," says the black-clad pariah, skipping, of course, the conventional pronoun "I" and joining form of etre. Purple eyes inspect me while they wait for a reply--colored contacts, a dirty film over an open window.

"Brian." Hypocrite.

"They call me Stripes." They, being the voices in your head? Angry-Brian snarls. In my head, of course. He's always an asshole.

"They call me Brian." I, on the other hand, am only mildly an asshole most of the time.

Whoever 'they' were, their nickname had a point: her hair, possibly originally black, was braided and dyed a plethora of different colors, which ran in stripes from the top of her head to the tips. Pastels seemed to be the theme. 

Colored-Contacts Mara continued to take me in: categorizing my appearance. My nondescript white shirt. My arm wrapped in wrist to elbow gauze. My very mainstream jeans. I'd seen that look before on the field, and I'd gotten it more here than all the games in my life put together. They were sizing me up, calculating their chance of winning. What game they played was still a guess.

I hunker down and shovel in the food on my tray without thinking. My athlete's appetite hasn't left. I wake up every morning to my stomach eating itself, and the hours between meals are a slow process of depletion. Colored-Contacts-"Stripes"-Mara winces, and mutters a warning. I keep shoveling.

I spend the whole night puking. I made a friend.