still night

It’s two a.m. and you’re awake.

You were lying there, sleeping, your bare arm across your cheek, a bare leg crooked over the body pillow. You always sleep this way – one foot out of the goose down.

And then, just like that, you’re awake.

You don’t know what woke you. You don’t know what you’d been dreaming. You only know that your heart feels like it doesn’t fit in your chest quite right. It feels… too big. It hurts. And that if there was someone sleeping next to you, you’d shake their shoulder, wake them. Please stay awake with me for a minute, you’d say.

You might not need to wake them at all; you might just hold onto them until your heart went back to being its normal fist-sized dimensions.

But there isn’t, so you don’t. Instead, your mind races. There on the bedside table, next to all those white candles –should you light them?—is your cell phone. Who do you call? Your sister in California. But it’s already past midnight on the West Coast. You need friends in Hawaii. Or is it the same time there? You really should figure out time zones. Europe! It’s morning in Europe. But you don’t know anyone there anymore.

You get dressed and go outside onto the front porch. You would smoke, but your hands were shaking and you put your last cigarette in your mouth backwards. And you lit it. So you can’t smoke. It’s cold and you don’t know what to do with your hands. You sit on them. That keeps them from shaking.

The night feels so enormous that it could swallow you. And you almost wish it would.

You feel like crying. You look up as a car drives down your street, only to find that it dead-ends. The cold air hits the back of your neck where the hood of your sweatshirt has slipped, and you realize you’re sweating. You put your hand to your wet hair, and then to your face, your burning eyes.

So this is delirium.

You go inside, headed toward the medicine cabinet. Something for this fever. There’s vicodin in there. From when you had strep throat. The stuff you didn’t even touch during those weird drug months. You swallow a long, white pill. Then you sit cross-legged in the middle of the big kitchen, feeling a little disoriented. A little lost.

And
so
very
small.

And you let your eyes tear. But mid-cry, you have to laugh. Crying’s like your favorite sport these days. Only it makes you feel unproductive. And crazy.

So you sit at your computer. And you write. More productive. More crazy? They’ll forgive you for being crazy, you think. Isn’t everyone a bit crazy? You decide to write until your thoughts are semi-lucid, until the vicodin is working. After that, you don’t know what you will do. Make tea? Write a letter you won’t send? Whatever it is, you do know that you will not get back in bed. In bed, it feels too lonely and your heart, too big.

Please stay awake with me for a minute?