This is deafening. There’s a steady ring, almost like a siren without the changing notes, rising in the back of my head; just where my spine meets the bottom of my skull. It’s rising upwards and forwards, and I can’t help but feel on edge. My skin is crawling. It feels like it’s stretching against my bones, like I’m growing exponentially and there’s no way it could possibly fit me anymore. I feel like I may just blow up. There are so many people talking, it sounds like a beehive. It’s noises like these that make me fill up. In my head all I can see is the same video playing over and over again. It’s me, and I’m yelling, and stretching my jaw further and further open until it just snaps and dangles there. I’m like a fire hydrant filled with light and sound, I begin to crack at my joints and split open as white and noise spill out of me. No, no, no.

“Are you alright there, bud?”

“What?”

“You just said no, no, no.” I can barely hear him over the ringing in my head.

“Yeah. I’m fine.” I can tell by the look on this man’s face that my own looks humiliated and appalled that anyone would need to ask. He’s standing above me, which doesn’t help with the inferiority complex. I am indignity.

“Ok, man. I just thought I’d ask.” He’s southern, his accent contorts his words and elongates his vowels. He sounds stupid; of course, he very obviously has a knack for recognizing and addressing a mental health issue. His mother was probably ill. My father was ill. We won’t connect.

I would move away from him, but there are waves running through me. They come from the bottoms of my feet. It feels as if the blood, or whatever is inside me, is running so close to the surface of my skin, it moves every insignificant hair on my body as it flows up to the crown of my head. I can feel his gaze still on me, eating away at the skin on my cheek. He’s waiting to see if I’ll talk to myself again. He’s honestly worried. I’m honestly annoyed. He wants what everyone wants, something crazy to happen to them in person. Everyone bases their life on entertainment. Someone else’s mental breakdown in public becomes your very own reality show, starring the southern, idiot savant. Psychologist to the world. I have to get away from hillbilly Freud as soon as possible.

The blaring rises. The screeching pushes against the back of my face. My eyes feel like they’re going to shoot out of my face. Like my forehead is going to open up and my frontal lobe will flop out onto the gray and white tile. I stand up; it feels like I’m swaying. I’m probably not. As I begin to make my way I can feel my toes clenching at the soles of my shoes. Any tighter and they may rip a toenail off. I’m only semi-aware of where I am. This is because my brain and eyelids are in the middle of a great civil war. The small part of me that still values self-preservation wants my eyes open so that I can see what to avoid as I step meaninglessly through this crowd. But then there are the other guys, my senses, which are about to abandon ship. Everything is running full throttle currently and if we add visual to this equation my terrible hallucination may just come true, and I would cover this whole crowd with everything that is awful inside of me. I’m hoping the heart will give in soon and write the treaty, I know he won’t be able to take much more of this. The way my chest feels, he’s already involved in a coup that entails smashing my sternum to bits.

The chatter; I feel like I can hear every snap of spit and every click of teeth in the room. It’s overwhelming, the meaningless dribble that’s being slathered about, squishing in and out of people’s ears, sliding over their brain, staining coherent thought, and then dripping out the other side. Words blending together, vowels mixing and consonants smashing and breaking one another. I cover my ears. I hear muffled “hey’s” and “watchout’s.” I tell myself to keep moving, although, for all I know I’m just wandering in a big circle. That’s when I hit my head, I can hear the knock on the back of my skull and it reverberates through my nose. And just as this happens my head is drained, everything that once was filling up so much space inside me feels as though it’s just drained down my spine and pushed out the middle of my back, returned to a world where it can actually fit. I open my eyes to see black hair, with a hand threaded through it, quickly turn into a porcelain, pale face. Her mouth is an oval. I hear nothing. My heart slows, and I feel as if I’m glowing. A subway car pulls into the station, my skin relaxes and it feels as though the air that the car brings is flowing right through me. The soothing scent of hot metal, of blood, pushes past me.

She’s talking. I am somewhere else, completely. Until she pulls my hands away from my head.

“Are you alright?”

I think before I answer, “I am.”

“You look delirious.”

“I feel delirious.”

“Are you sure you’re okay?”

“Yeah. I’m sorry. Well, I was having an awful time, but it seems almost concussing the both of us really turned things around. Who knew you could change everything by walking around with your hands over your ears and your eyes clasped shut?”

“Are you always like this? Or did you befall some other head trauma just before trying to knock me out?”

She’s beautiful, “I wish I could answer that truthfully.”

So here I am, wherever this is. An ugly street, in a wasted downtown, and my eyes are fixated on the dandelion growing out of the concrete. “Poor little weed. I wonder how many bums have pissed on you. You’ve persevered though, good for you.” I think that after at least three to four bums I myself would have given up on this dreadful wasteland and just receded back into the concrete from which I came.

Anyway, here I am, the cutest little weed and me, here, waiting for a man named Thomas. Oh the things I do to be able to tell other people that, even though I’m 25 and still bartending with no prospect of upward mobility, at least I’m not single. At least I’ve found love, right? 

“Sweetheart, I need you to go out and wait for Thomas, he’s the one bringing the stuff. You do have cash on you, right? At least 65 dollars?” Irene says this through a crooked smile, because she watched me take a hundred out of an ATM today for the coke I wanted to buy tonight. 

I don’t know what drug dealer these days delivers pot, especially only an eighth. She’s probably fucking him. And the bag will probably be light. These are my two predictions for the evening. Three if you count how many bums I’m guessing pissed on the dandelion, which is thirty-five. Two of these things I can know for sure, and one of them I will find out in, what I hope, is the next five minutes. You can never count on anyone who’s selling weed to show up exactly on time, especially if they’re only getting 65 dollars for it. Unless of course you’re fucking them. So here’s how we’ll figure out the other thing, if Thomas shows up on time he’s fucking my sneaky, underhanded girlfriend. Although, if he’s late then he still might be fucking her, she is dating me after all.

I look down at my watch as it rounds itself to exactly twelve o’clock, and as I begin to set in place my impatient look I hear the sound of an engine, Thomas’ engine. Of course he’s driving some kind of hybrid, from some company that I’m sure I would hate if I only took the time to look into it. Or gave enough of a shit. Thomas looks how I envisioned him, slightly dirty, his long hair could be dreadlocks but it’s too dark to tell, and he smells of patchouli. Before he gets the window all the way down he’s already asking the question I would rather not hear,

“Hey, where’s Irene?” 

“She sent me down to get the weed.”

Apparently, I said this too loud. “Shhh! Shit, man, are you trying to tell the whole neighborhood?”

“No, just the only other weed that’s out tonight.” I would wink at the dandelion because I know he would appreciate it, a street-wise flora like himself, but Thomas the girlfriend-fucker is already looking at me like I’m an asshole.

“What’d you say, man?” He pauses long enough for me to say something, but I don’t explain myself to idiots, “Alright, nevermind, it’s a hundred bucks.”

“No, it’s sixty-five. Irene said sixty-five.”

“Well, I’m saying ONE-HUNDRED, and it’s MY weed.”

“Well I’m saying sixty-five, or I report your car on your way home with YOUR weed in it. And trust me, it’s not hard to spot a Prius, or whatever gay car this is, in this kind of neighborhood.” 

“You’re an asshole,” he says this while he’s pulling the weed from his coat pocket, I wouldn’t normally like someone saying something like this to me but this time it means that I won. 

I pull the hundred dollar bill from my pocket, and as he hands me the bag I hold it up, “Do you have change for a bill?” 

He stares at me like he’s going to cry or scream then whips around in his car while fumbling through his jacket, produces his wad and thumbs out 35 bucks. We exchange bills and he squeezes out, “You are such an asshole.” This one I don’t like, so while he’s re-situating himself in his car I make a trip around the back. I then put the heel of my boot through his taillight. It’s hard not to love the kind of breaking sound that’s been well-deserved. 

As I start walking back into the apartment, Thomas jumps out in a fit that would rival a four year olds, waving his arms about and making a sort of screeching noise. 

“What the hell, man? What’s wrong with you?”

“Drive safe, Thomas! Cops love to patrol around here.” I wave my finger around pretending that it has the ability to show the size of the wrecked streets surrounding us, “Oh, and stop fucking my girlfriend.” I smile at Thomas, wink at the dandelion and close the door behind me.

On my way up the stairs I keep hoping that Thomas will fly up the stairs after me on a wind of self-righteousness. Irene has the right to choose whoever she wants, and you have to respect other people’s property even when you don’t like them; but unfortunately he just gets back in his car and regrets not standing up for himself all the way home. I’ll find out later that he made it home fine that night, with no added blemishes to a sterling criminal record, which consisted of a trespassing charge when he was found smelling his next-door neighbors underwear. A man’s underwear. What I’ll never know is that a cop did follow him for several blocks, fully intending to pull over the surprisingly expensive car in a surprisingly decrepit neighborhood, until they received another call for a disturbance on the same street that I was just waiting on. Two buildings from where Thomas and myself had our little discrepancy over whether his car should have two taillights or one, there’s an older man who has lived on the second floor for around 20 years. In that twenty years he’s been given the uncanny ability to hear any kind of voices raised or glass broken within a mile of his house, a skill much need for this street if you ask me. So it was my temper that kept the girlfriend-fucker from getting what I felt he deserved. But I’ll never know that, so I’ll never fix it. Funny little world isn’t it, dandelions?