March 27, 2008

• Please. Stop.

  Do you want me to beg?

  Please, I beg you, stop it.
  You have no right, coming to me when I’m asleep, when I’m sposed to be safe from -
  And then you come, with your fair face and your kind hazel eyes – glinting with some deliciously grown-up knowledge, and we walk through the airport and you’ve known me all my waking life and I’m looking at you, out of the corner of my eye, and you’re tall and handsome and serious, and free – so free…. and I want to hate you but I don’t know why, because all that sears through me right then is the pleasure of being reunited with a lost limb.

  And you talk with your tenor-tinted voices, words paced and measured like a teacher, with more patience than a parent, and still that glint of something in your eyes like you know something I don’t

  And someone hits me with an elbow to the head and for a second I see double but when I look at you again, you’re gone, and pain gives me twice what I think I want but takes you away from me and I wander the airport, the carpeted ramps sheathed in halls of sunlight that stream through impossibly tall windows and I look down over a banister and there you are, looking up at me from the lower floor, chagrined and impatient that it’s taken me so long to realize where I was headed.

  “About time,” you say, in that not-quite-condescending way that makes me want to crawl onto your lap and find the source of why you smell like summer lawns and lemon cookies and I tell you without speaking that my head hurts.

  A dozen yellow packets of pills fall down a chute to tumble in a heap at my feet. Pills of all shapes and sizes, and I squish them with childish glee through the crinkling wrappers. I don’t know which ones to take, I say with my eyes.

  “Take two of the red ones,” you answer sagely.

  And the pain goes away.

  And we walk through the airport.

  And board the plane.

  And get married.

  And have children.

  And I’m driving home from work on that road that winds through the mountains – driving home from a job in a career that means something to you and it scares me, driving down the one-lane road with a fantastic view but acute switchbacks and it scares me, doing things like that though they scare me because you’re so proud of me and I’m happy and me cell phone rings and I glance at it on the passenger seat

  And it rings and I remember

  And it rings and it’s too good to be true

  And it rings and I’m dreaming and do I want to wake up and do I want it to end?

  And it rings and I remember how too good to be true everything was and do I want everything to end and it’s such a horrible choice – do I dream and dream knowing nothing is real but knowing that nothing is real makes me want to stop dreaming and everything cascades down like a landslide of crumbling red bricks with sharp corners so I close my eyes and take my hands off the wheel and wait for that elusive myth of eternal peace

  I wanted that darkness

  But I woke up instead.

  • 9:49 am
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