A short tale about a long night
Eleven pm, time to decide if there would be sleep or not, and if so, how. Sleep aids, alcohol (requiring a hefty renunciation though), hot bath with sea salt and scented candles, an old college textbook, or maybe just a big bottle of her roommate's sedatives settling the issue once and forever. Sleep after all, was a misnomer - there was an alternative to sober consciousness ahead of her, however sleep or slumber was not the order of the evening. Most likely, they were waking up together now, and she needed to escape the moment they would turn to each other, smiling like kids finding a quarter for a tooth under their pillow, stretching just to reunite into the knot they spent hours untying through the night. She really needed to be spared this seven time zone tango tonight.
Distance was another ridiculously named mechanism of relief. Time and distraction two other twins tempting hope but betraying torment. She was rapidly encroaching that threshold where survival no longer bargained the pain, and relief actually resembled release, not recovery. Like one of those stories from the humanities course she had no talent for, she knew what was ahead of her for the next eight hours, a trilogy of trouble that would escalate to the dread of another dawn, the recursion of the reality of his loss, the jealous realization of his gain.
First, there would be the battle to find a place in the bed, the vector between the comforter (hah!), the top sheet, the two pillows, and her vexations. She would doze off, there was no doubt about that - but not before she found the ideal juxtaposition, perhaps two pillows tonight, the blanket folded three times tucked between her knees, her body turned and tilted away from the computer screen that had once been her lifeline to him. Once tucked up, she would find the evening's mantra, a few words at most uttered incessantly until she fell asleep, perpetually driving away his/their spectre like a enamored mosquito too quick to kill, too stupid to leave. The chant would send her to sleep eventually, but the reprieve would be brief, at most, only a few hours. From there, she would enter the second stage of her nocturnal nuance, four hours or so of tossing and tumbling about the bed, vainly invoking the evening's incantation, fighting for every twenty or thirty minutes of amnesiac torpor. Finally, she would face the last two hours of the morning, no longer trying to sleep, just trying to survive to devastating half-wake depression that had no remedy, no respite. Everything hurt so much more acutely right before dawn - God must have created man then she thought, as it had to be the time He would take him back as well. It was a deep, dark place that begat beginnings and endings, never meant for the living. Sleeping sucked.
The weekends were far different though, and if she could, she would sleep straight through them - something about not having to get up and bravely face the world upon demand disrupted her three-fold troika, and she was ever so grateful for the abeyance. The three trials would be there, but not in any sort of concert or coordination, and confused, could be bamboozled blithely with any of a dozen or so distractions she could conjure easily. Trinkets that took her through the weekend - baubles and doodads designed to persevere the pain until she got back to work on Monday. Her life had been distilled to this - rules of refraction, a debutante of deflection.
To be continued....
Eleven pm, time to decide if there would be sleep or not, and if so, how. Sleep aids, alcohol (requiring a hefty renunciation though), hot bath with sea salt and scented candles, an old college textbook, or maybe just a big bottle of her roommate's sedatives settling the issue once and forever. Sleep after all, was a misnomer - there was an alternative to sober consciousness ahead of her, however sleep or slumber was not the order of the evening. Most likely, they were waking up together now, and she needed to escape the moment they would turn to each other, smiling like kids finding a quarter for a tooth under their pillow, stretching just to reunite into the knot they spent hours untying through the night. She really needed to be spared this seven time zone tango tonight.
Distance was another ridiculously named mechanism of relief. Time and distraction two other twins tempting hope but betraying torment. She was rapidly encroaching that threshold where survival no longer bargained the pain, and relief actually resembled release, not recovery. Like one of those stories from the humanities course she had no talent for, she knew what was ahead of her for the next eight hours, a trilogy of trouble that would escalate to the dread of another dawn, the recursion of the reality of his loss, the jealous realization of his gain.
First, there would be the battle to find a place in the bed, the vector between the comforter (hah!), the top sheet, the two pillows, and her vexations. She would doze off, there was no doubt about that - but not before she found the ideal juxtaposition, perhaps two pillows tonight, the blanket folded three times tucked between her knees, her body turned and tilted away from the computer screen that had once been her lifeline to him. Once tucked up, she would find the evening's mantra, a few words at most uttered incessantly until she fell asleep, perpetually driving away his/their spectre like a enamored mosquito too quick to kill, too stupid to leave. The chant would send her to sleep eventually, but the reprieve would be brief, at most, only a few hours. From there, she would enter the second stage of her nocturnal nuance, four hours or so of tossing and tumbling about the bed, vainly invoking the evening's incantation, fighting for every twenty or thirty minutes of amnesiac torpor. Finally, she would face the last two hours of the morning, no longer trying to sleep, just trying to survive to devastating half-wake depression that had no remedy, no respite. Everything hurt so much more acutely right before dawn - God must have created man then she thought, as it had to be the time He would take him back as well. It was a deep, dark place that begat beginnings and endings, never meant for the living. Sleeping sucked.
The weekends were far different though, and if she could, she would sleep straight through them - something about not having to get up and bravely face the world upon demand disrupted her three-fold troika, and she was ever so grateful for the abeyance. The three trials would be there, but not in any sort of concert or coordination, and confused, could be bamboozled blithely with any of a dozen or so distractions she could conjure easily. Trinkets that took her through the weekend - baubles and doodads designed to persevere the pain until she got back to work on Monday. Her life had been distilled to this - rules of refraction, a debutante of deflection.
To be continued....
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