‘Ah, Christ.’
The Vyvanse bottle was empty. I cursed myself: I’d meant to go to the chemist after work two days ago, but I’d been frazzled from a full day of sales as the warranty requests piled up. Because the meds had worn off by four o’clock as they always did, I’d committed the unforgivable sin of forgetting to replenish the only thing that had ever made an improvement to my perpetually shocking short-term memory.
I stared down into the white plastic container, as though I could manifest the little pink-and-white capsules through my gaze alone. My thoughts began to spiral as anxiety crept in, gently pulling aside the dissociative veil of calm that I’d become so adept at maintaining.
Nearly three decades of memories resurfaced in under a second. Sophie, one of the girls in my grade-three school camp, out of breath, holding my only backpack in one hand as we boarded the bus. The cop at my car window, growing increasingly impatient as I ransacked my glove compartment for the driver’s licence that I’d taken out to fill out a job application the month before. My first girlfriend, in tears as I stood empty-handed in the doorway without so much as a card to celebrate her birthday.
I stumbled out to the share house kitchen, clad in boxer-briefs and the t-shirt I’d worn to bed for a week straight. With my vision blurred by the mucus in my eyes, I filled my hands with water from the tap and smacked them against my face. I mixed my iced-coffee in the only glass I owned, and added the now-empty two-litre milk bottle to the already monstrous pile atop the fridge.
Forty-five minutes later, I was panicking. Where in the hell was my work shirt? I’d checked my whole bedroom already. There was nothing left in the laundry basket that served as my makeshift wardrobe. My work pants had been part of the clothes pile on the end of the bed that I’d kicked off the side during the night, but the work shirt was nowhere to be found.
For ten minutes, I double-checked everywhere I could remember holding clothes in my hands since the last laundry day. The clothesline on the patio. Beside the washing machine. In the bathroom. On the K-Mart clothes rack above my bed that held my scarcely-used bomber jacket. Even the places I’d already looked, in case my brain’s lack of object permanence had…
I pulled open the second drawer of my tallboy and looked down at the single, neatly-folded blue shirt on top of the stack of casual clothes that I’d thought I’d thrown out. Why the hell did I even own a tallboy? Every single time I used it for its intended purpose, it was as though its contents ceased to exist. I really needed something with clear drawers, but even that would probably blend into my daily surroundings, like the ancient chip packets littering my desk.
By the time it hit eight-forty, I was acutely aware of the absence of my stimulants. I ripped my phone off the charger. The bloody thing was hot enough to burn a hole through my sheets; I had no idea when I’d even plugged it in. Pulling on my socks, I discovered one was inside-out but I had no time to fix it. I grabbed my backpack and was halfway out the door when I reached for my keys and felt only the smooth fabric of an empty pocket.
‘Keys…keys.’
I scanned the room for them. They’d been painted bright green and orange years ago specifically to make it easier to find the bloody things, but there was no sign of them. Epiphany struck, and I dove for the pile of worn clothing. There they were, in the inside-out pair of pants that I’d worn yesterday.
I arrived at work two minutes late. My boss was busy with a customer, so I gave him a repentant grimace and pointed to the pile of boxes at the rear of the shop. He rolled his eyes and nodded. Tipping the first eighty-kilo box on its side, I realised that I hadn’t retrieved the Stanley knife from the front counter. In an act of spite towards my keys, I used them to attack the cardboard and rip open the top. As I bent over to flip the disassembled chair out, I felt my pants slide down my hips.
Self-hatred boiled up inside me. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath that did absolutely nothing to calm me. There was a full day of heavy lifting in front of me, and after all the panic and double-checking, I’d remembered everything but my bloody belt.
© Tropical Writers Inc 2026