Debriefing

You wake up with a jolt—it takes you a few moments to recognize your room from the floor. Your headache is paralyzing, as if the vice of a wrathful, moral god is cranking down on your cranium. With eyes half open, you grope your surroundings for your iPhone. Five unread texts, three e-mails and a voicemail from a cabbie you kept waiting. One of the texts is from you. “Brown hair, nice legs.” You don’t remember her or her nice legs or sending the text.

The most recent text reads simply: “food?”

Piling into the back of a suburban, your conversation consists of rhetorical questions about the previous night and an arrhythmic symphony of grunts. Your memory of last night’s events are still hazy and you’ve got the anxious feeling that the people with you in the car will be able to fill you in. You hope you did something cool. No one says anything of substance until everyone orders. Once settled, the stories start to come out one by one, gradually and then suddenly. After passing pieces of mixed-up jigsaw puzzles across the table, everyone’s night is eventually put together. This is debriefing.