What Came Up Overnight

You ask what came up overnight, and all I can think of is vomit. The purging kind, where one is left drained, wrung out, hung over, Mack Truck flat, pancaked, schmeised, whammed, smashed, laid out, wrecked, racked, ruined. And somehow feeling better.

But no. Write about vomit. How can anyone write about vomit. And why would you. After all, what is there, past the rotting fruit smell, to write about vomit.

How janitors – now maintenance staff – in elementary schools, sprinkle the pool in the hall with pink stuff that’s supposed to smell like cherry popsicles, but that just ends up making cherry popsicles smell like vomit.

Or how it feels in the middle of the flu, where the only thing worse than throwing up is not throwing up. Even when there’s nothing left to let go.

Or how it feels to have someone who loves you hold your hair back, then soothe your forehead after.

Or how it becomes competitive among the freshmen, trying to figure out how to become men in a world where there are no clear rites of passage from boyhood to manhood – not driving, not voting, not selective service, not leaving for college, not sex, not work, perhaps fatherhood unless it comes too early or too little or too late. Competitive. Like ballistic barfing. Random ralphing. Wild woofing. Sometimes thin and stringy, yellow with bile, ropy threads drooling from the mouth after. Sometimes nothing but beer, down and then up again. Sometimes it feels like the heart turning inside out, burning the throat, as undigested chunks of everyday life, wolfed down without being tasted, unchewed, return the way they came. Competitive. Varsity vomiting. And how sometimes women do it, too.

Or how it feels in the ER, full of charcoal and self-loathing and disgust and not even being able to get this right, too few pills and not enough time.

Or how, for a pregnant woman with a chronic illness, morning sickness brings with it the threat of throwing up one’s meds.

Or how it feels in the ER after the injection of adrenaline or inhalation of atropine and the lungs open but so do the shakes, and you have to decide whether to let it go or hold it down.

Or how it feels in the ER after the saline IV to rehydrate after throwing up all day and not wanting to lose the baby, and in the next bed is a fifteen-year-old, with her wrists restrained, who rattles the bedrails because she has not, quite yet, learned to purge on command.

Or how it feels to have the dry heaves over the side of a boat in sixteen foot seas in the middle of the night, with the rudder gone and dawn and rescue still hours off, and you wonder will it ever, ever, ever be over or might it be better to drown.