Pidgeonholes Volume 3.5: 90's Mixtape

# "Dolores! Wake up! Dolores!”

It was 1am. We’d had a get-together with some friends -drinking wine, goofing about -- and now it was just the two of us.

At first, it was still fun. Dolores could keep a party going -- the wisecracks, the wit, the jokes and sly digs at people we both knew -- but at some point, she had just stopped.

She sat in the chair by the desk and wouldn't move. Her eyes were fixed on something, nothing, on invisible space. The expression on her face was frozen, as if she was wearing a mask. Her pupils were pinpricks, black dots, in the vast blue oceans of her eyes.

"Dolores! Please, wake up!"

The word ‘catatonic’ kept going through my head along with an internal movie-reel of horror flicks with asylums and unsympathetic white-coated doctors and locked doors. I shook her, feeling her arm underneath my hands: unresponsive and dead.

I didn't know how to reach her.

I had to call an ambulance. # Next day at the hospital, she was like nothing had happened and I was relieved to see her eyes were normal again. She sat up in bed and quizzed me.