Sleeping Badly – Part 3

In the deep hours of the night, everybody is awake. All have been shaken, and nobody remains asleep. We have all taken notice. We have all taken inventory. It’s a sad difficult state of affairs. This night will pass without another wink of sleep. This night has been kidnapped by scrutiny and unease. We sit in shitty nervous laughter, stewing in our insanity like a pair of piss-soaked pants. It feels like we’ll never sleep again. We’ll turn on all the lights, each one in the house, and each one out in the yard. We’re not celebrating. We’re not drunk. We just want to see what’s coming. Our incandescent light will penetrate as deeply out into the heart of the night as it can and still fall short. It won’t keep anything away. It will only clearly illuminate what’s coming to kill us.

Sleeping Badly – Part 2

Last night was not a good night for sleeping. It was hot. There was a great deal of sweating, but not the fun kind. There were a lot of nightmares. It was like a horror movie marathon, one after another. My wife has gotten used to me waking up intermittently, yelling and/or hyperventilating. She used to ask me if I was okay. Now she just rolls over. It’s not that she’s insensitive. It’s that she’s just accepted that there’s nothing she can do to help. The only thing there is to do is endure them. I can rarely recall any details when I wake up. Rarely do I get any keepers out of my dreams. I just remember the emotionally painful, bad sleep. I’m so goddamn stupid, I can’t even sleep correctly.

Sleeping Badly – Part 1

The night is heavy, impossibly heavy, all the way up until sleep comes. As you try to gain distance from the previous day’s mess, the night won’t let you forget about tomorrow. It taunts you with the approaching morning, and all the impending struggles of the day to come. In the night you struggle to reflect, understand, and get a grip. In daylight you fail visibly and loudly. In the night you fail dimly and silently.

Debt

I gave myself to it, like I was a debt owed. I relinquished myself and all of my weight. The exchange was decisive but gentle. It happened with the smoothness and precision of a surgeon’s scalpel. I flowed out of it like hot blood. Nobody demanded reasons from me. Nobody questioned. It was self-apparent. All was repaid. I left.

I left on my own two feet. I’d never done that before. I’d always been a casualty. There were doors open, and nothing left for me there. No good reason to stay, but lots of good reasons to feel bad about leaving. I just walked out, off to my new destination.

The Ride Home

The window’s down, and the miles are falling away slowly along this familiar stretch of road. It’s 37 degrees Fahrenheit outside. The air smells cold and dirty. I’m very consciously amplifying this scent with my cigarette. I’m not so much smoking it as I’m burning it like incense. It mixes perfectly with the smells of rusty industrial decay and the landscape of wooded western Pennsylvania in the autumn. I couldn’t feel more at home anywhere else. I couldn’t feel more secure. My left hand is dangling out the window. The ambient temperature, combined with the forward movement of the car, is freezing my hand and the left side of my face. It’s cold, but it’s okay. I’m enjoying it. The cold loves me, and so does the dirt. I am a part of it. Black Sabbath is throbbing through the speakers, loud, slow and fuzzy. I’m driving along the train tracks. They are to my right, and the Ohio River is to their right. I’m headed home from work, away from town.