I roam the country and its cities in my mind, passing quietly down streets, past houses where families are asleep, where air is warmed between lovers sleeping close, where old men sit and play dominoes, where friends talk and laugh, undeterred by the shortening sleep the night will allow them.
And then, there are the other houses. Houses where lives within are marked only by blue liquid crystal glows and cathode ray flickers through windows, and by the muted and curiously sad and lonely sound of canned laughter in the middle of the night, echoes from decades ago. So many houses, filled with electronic ghosts keeping the living from being quite so alone.
The night, the avoiding of the waiting bed, with its hollowness in the center, is the loneliest time. It's another surrender of another day to unconsciousness, to just brief bouts of oblivious escape between panicked wakings.
Some of those awakenings come with the immediate realization of being alone, doubling you over like the piercing pangs of a stomach virus, a pain that won't be escaped, no matter how much you roll from side to side, curl into a tight ball, wrench at your sides with desperate hands.
And sometimes, it's just waking to the sound of your own voice, speaking a name unheard in months, or years, or, a simple, "no," as she turns to go, pulling the curtain down behind her on a dream.
The eyelids are heavy. The head nods. The arm twitches. The people on the television speak in a disjointed dialogue, longer and longer portions dropping out until the plot is lost. I've struggled, but there's only so much you can do when the day is so far gone.
I want a dark and dreamless sleep. I fear anything else. I fear waking in the morning, what the light will expose, I fear fighting the same fights, trying to make something out of nothing. It's been so long. So long, cut up into days that seem like those fitful awakenings in the night, days that end only in the cold comfort of flat faces and their recorded voices.
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