Concerning the Morning

   Waking up. Forever one of the most unpleasant sensations. Purgatory of the unjust and innocent alike.
  Taylor had worked out a sense of scale for the degrees of disillusioned awakening, but was usually too indecisive per event to determine where one would actually rank. It had become a routine: rise in a panic, reassure that the Worm Dream was still only a dream, and somewhere along staggering across the scarred linoleum toward the lavatory, work out where this new disorientation fit along the scale.
  The focus of the moment was that he was in the apartment. He had at least made it to the couch-slash-bed, if not out of his clothes, which was better than sometimes, but had gravitated to the floor some time during the night. This was distinctly unhealthy, but more than that bemusing. He’d always thought he slept lighter than that.
  Well the important part was that he was here. Once, he had come to consciousness in a public restroom. Now even recalling the blue and white, florescent bathed tile and rows of sinks, stalls and mirrors still put him in contact with a feeling, or sense, or unnamed emotion, some mental buzzing more reminiscent of a color than something he could catch and identify. Or know if there was anything TO identify. Whatever it was it made him sick and frenetic. But he disliked thinking about those things.
  The blind man’s saxophone curls filtered in the derelict flat like a shower of disturbed dust. They were faint, a distinguishable blues riff rising the two stories from his ubiquitous position on the saturnine steps. It was daylight, Taylor surmised. Somehow the blind man still knew the difference and acted on it. Now and then Taylor wondered if someone came and told him when to go home. If he had a home. He went somewhere during dusk.
  Taylor had once asked the blind man to remove his opaque black glasses. He had looked into that pearly mirror of his own sallow face and couldn’t stop the image of his own head holding those waxen eyes. He shivered at the memory.
  Back into the big room. The sax was louder in here, the blind man sitting just beneath the larger window. Taylor pulled his coat from the seldom-used card table, emptying the pockets in hopes of change loose enough to procure coffee and a stale croissant at the café three blocks down. Material clattered on the pressboard surface. Keys to the door. Half empty packet of gum. The knife.
  It was black, matte finished, with a fractal serrated blade and spring release. He could never remember when or where he had acquired it, but always felt it was something important, like a sentimental memento or something. It had a myriad of uses, he gave it that.
  The other pocket had revealed a farrago of coins, and the broken glasses earpiece he’d had to replace and never got rid of.
  And an envelope. Again. He beheld it with a sense of resignation. It was the generic business type, security lined and adorned only with his own name in a fluid, familiar script. No return address. It was almost a gaudy scrawl, one he had once found amusement in the similarities between it and his own. Maybe it was some twisted, distant sense of cosmic irony, because sometimes it was like Eric really could be his brother. Occasionally Taylor would wonder if maybe they were, separate by time and unaware.
  He shoved the envelope back into the overcoat’s pocket. He would read it down the street, while eating what might tentatively, by people unlike he, be called breakfast.