It starts in the toes. It crawls up slowly, painstakingly so, until it wraps over the calves and shins and hits the knees like when you've sat Indian-style for too long and the thousands of pins sticking into your legs refuse to forgive. It pinches you until it's got your stomach buckled, and you fold over because you can't stop. You stare at the floor and then decide that's not comfortable, so you crane your neck to stare at the murmuring television blurred and not at all relevant, and you stay that way until you've either got a crick in your neck or you think you're going to vomit. So you gasp. You gulp down as many pockets of air as you can, and you fumble for the bathroom, awkwardly trying to untangle yourself from your spot in front of the television, your spot on the floor, the spot where your knees got cut and your stomach buckled. If you're lucky, you make it. If you aren't lucky, you stop and wait a second and shut your eyes until black turns to red because when you squeeze your eyes hard enough you see funny colors, colors that make no sense, but then they start reminding you of stuff. People. Events. And then BAM; you're back to the thing you were trying to get away from to begin with, back even before you were stuck there on the carpet, back before you tried to make it to the bathroom and only made it for the linoleum floor to singe your skin it's so cold. You pant and you talk to the floor and you tell it things that don't even make sense, you ramble and clamp your teeth together and fumble around to clutch your clothes at awkward places, because you feel like they're falling off just like the world is falling off of its axis, and just when you think you're about to nosedive into the floor and the red spots turn to white because you're squeezing your eyes even more, you gasp and make a bee-line to the bathroom where you promptly hit the seat of the toilet like its home-base in a first grade game of freeze tag, and your elbows hit the cut knees and your toes start trying to hug each other, and they turn into each other like pigeon feet and twist up in each other and scratch at each other, and then you realize the socks you're wearing are your toes only protection from yourself, because if it weren't for your socks you'd have bleeding feet on top of everything else, and then it hits you that something is protecting you from yourself at all times, day or not, toilet seat or taxi cab seat, and you didn't plan any of this, you didn't know it was happening, but putting on socks that morning was the most pivotal thing you did. And then it starts all over again, and you start clawing at your face and pulling at your hair as you fold over, because you realize the only highlight to your life is that pivotal moment when you realized socks saved you, so you relapse. You wheeze. You stare at yourself in the mirror and then you glare at yourself in the mirror and you kick at your socks because you're pissed off that they were the best things that happened to you today. And then you can't help but laugh because you're clapping your feet together like a walrus claps his flippers, and then the doorbell rings. And you wipe your face, sigh, sniff up all that snot and swallow it down, and answer the door with a smile because it's the only thing you know how to do.