All The Trees Still Look Like Wallpaper

What happens after the adrenaline wears off.

A week had gone by, and in my memory, it is all a blur. I realized that I had only just barely held myself together on that first day, riding the adrenaline of it all.

Every night I tried to rest. Every morning, I would rise, after only two hours of sleep, waking violently and covered in sweat. I would lay there in the company of the cool and unempathetic reptiles, staring at the art that covered Bella’s spare room.

She had been a line cook alongside a local artist a few years back and he would paint these beautiful and terrifying paintings while coming down from hardcore narcotics. It was his way of purging his psyche and getting through the withdrawals. I laid in bed, in all my fatigue, involuntarily vigilant, slowly reading the schizophrenic scrawlings over neon colors as the sun rose and illuminated the room.

My morning routine consisted of two fingers of Bulleit Rye, coffee, and a smoke. Bella kept trying to make sure I ate. I walked slowly through the house, carrying a gravity that held the air down in every room I entered. I liked to sit on the porch. I remember feeling almost scared to go touch the trees. Sometimes I would venture off the porch and do it anyways, then immediately head back. Like a dog trying to taste the ocean without being caught by the splash of a wave.

“The trees still feel like wallpaper to me when I look out the window. My brain can’t register them as real yet.” I said quietly and wistfully to Alan.

“Then go touch them more.” It was the gentlest I had ever heard him speak to anyone. He had a deep voice and was known for being blunt and cold at times. The contrast took me by surprise.

“I’m not ready yet. It feels like too much.”

“Well, when you’re ready, we should go for a walk out there. I’ll show you the trails behind the house.”

I think Alan understood. He had done some chunks of time himself. Not as long as me, but he knew it meant. He understood better than anyone else did.

---

A few more days pass, and I learn that I love laying on a grungy old couch they had left in the middle of a sunny meadow in their front yard. Bella and Alan’s two pit bulls also loved this couch and would lay contentedly with me while I chain smoked cigarettes and half-heartedly cuddled my bottle. My eyes and ears were still so sensitive, and I noticed a pattern. Every time a bird chirps or a twig snaps, the dogs’ ears twitch and tilt to listen, and simultaneously my eyes snap towards the area it came from. We feel synchronous in many ways.

One of the pit bulls was an old fight dog from Stockton that became Alan’s best friend and road companion. She was 18 years old, riddled with cancer, and just refused to die. Her head had a long scar across her forehead, and she would look up at me with the sweetest smile every time she saw me, but especially when she knew I was afraid and overwhelmed. We called her Griselda. As in Blanco. Born Bad.

Grissy didn’t like just anyone, but she loved people who were fresh out of jail. She probably just identified the smell of prison with being reunited with her owner, but we were all convinced she really understood what it meant to get out - since she started loving convicts after the first time she was released from the dog pound. There were endless jokes about her being the most convict of us all.

“Alan, can I give Grissy another piece of my steak? Or would that be bad for her?”

“Dude, Grissy can do whatever she wants. She’s on her fourth contract with the devil for a longer life and has fought more cops than all of us put together.”

Bella chimes in, “We like to say that Grissy is a terrible dog, but an amazing person.”

---

The best sleep I got during that time was with those two dogs.

And Grissy always took good care of me when I was a drunken mess.

---

I wake again in the middle of the night, eyes wide open as I lay in a puddle of warmth between the two dogs on the couch. My boots are still on, because I only take them off to bathe. There is this non-negotiable feeling of needing to MOVE. Unsure of what to do with myself, I peel myself out of the blanket and stumble forward like a haggard Vietnam vet. Then, I quietly pace the house, scanning the pitch-black night outside every window.