I Couldn’t Get Out of Bed, So I Went for a Walk

“You wanna buy a knife?” asked a voice.

Illustration by Rolli

I couldn’t get out of bed, so I went for a walk.

There weren’t many people in Emergency. An old lady kept rubbing her breast. A sunburned man staggered up to the desk and asked the triage nurse out on a date. She pressed a red button and he vanished. I looked at the button and thought, I could use one of those.

“Have you been drinking?” the nurse asked me.

I was having trouble putting the failure of my life into words.

“Take a seat,” she said at last.

I waited two hours, three hours. The room really filled up.

I hadn’t realized I was wearing mismatched shoes.

After four hours, I got up.

“What are you doing later?” another drunk asked the nurse as I walked out the door.

There’s a beautiful park across from my apartment that’s used mostly for selling drugs and sex. One sex worker pretends to talk on the pay phone in the middle of the park, all day. If a man approaches her, she hangs up. I’ve hardly ever gone past when she wasn’t on the phone.

I walk in the park when I’m depressed because I don’t care about the danger.