Walking in the rain

I rolled over, on Thursday... oh, who the hell am I kidding. I was on the Internet the entire night, because I got dropped off here, ostensibly to pick up the bus schedules, but really to get away from my life because my sleep had been so unremittingly awful that I didn't want to miss the last appointment of the week that was contingent on waking up early enough to be there.

Namely, the appointment with my therapist.

I got back home at 8:00, as the sun was up, and showered, and shaved, and took another Concerta to keep me moving until I passed out that night. I changed my pants, changed my socks, changed my shirts, and got ready to trek back to the last place I was certain the bus would stop en route to Northampton.

And that's when I discovered that all of my ID was missing.

Disregard the rest of the week. That was what I wound up gushing to the Therapist about for an hour. And then I hopped another bus, rode it back to Haigis Mall, and started the arduous task of tracking down my lost cards.

The first stop: the library. Downstairs had no idea where it was, so they suggested that I go upstairs. Upstairs hadn't seen it either; they told me that they usually dropped their stuff off with campus police.

Oh, fuck. Anything that involves cops makes my day worse immediately; but it was my driver's license, my debit card, my insurance cards, my library cards, and a bunch of others that were on the line here, so what was I to do? Man up and start the trek down the hill to the police station.

I've been to the UMass police department (never, thank God, for anything I'd done myself), but it took a few walks around the place where I'd been (at 4:00 in the morning, natch, to post bail for somebody I didn't even know) before I realized the awful truth: the PD had moved. And was now not only on the far side of campus, but at the highest elevation of the campus as well.

Right that moment, two other things happened. The first was that I crashed. My Concerta finally failed to offset the massive fatigue that had been building up for hours. And the second? It started raining. By the time I got to the top of the hill, I could hear my socks squish with every step I took.

The PD didn't even have anybody there. I had to leave a message on a black courtesy telephone that was no such thing. And then, turning, I trekked back down the hill, stopped at the library for an hour or two, and began the long walk home.

Everything was wrong. My coat was too hot, my bookbag too heavy, my underlayers too light, and my feet too wet. By the time I made it back home, I was shivering, and my phone was dead, and not only my socks but my shoes were squishy with every step that I took.

And when I'd changed into new clothing, dry clothing, and dry socks and shoes (and the skin on my feet had a layer of pale gray that scratched off, as if it'd already started necrotizing from the walk home), I hopped the divider and checked the last two places I had been the night before.

Neither had seen any of my ID.