I remember waking up on a gym mat disguised as a mattress, atop a crumbling composite frame. The sun was hours away and actual sleep was much further. The room was dimly lit by my roommate’s small bedside lamp, which he’d had brought in from home, as he couldn’t sleep without it. Most people on that floor had taken advantage of the supposed rule-bending which the staff was willing to commit in order to ensure compliance. I hadn’t. But I didn’t mind the lamp. One night as we sat up talking quietly after lights out, I told him that I actually quite liked it. He held up both hands, lowered his eyes, and said “I’m not accusing you of patronizing me, but I am feeling a little patronized right now.” It sounded very practiced, almost bored, but he was being sincere when he said things like that. He was often a stream of coping mechanisms and exercises, but it apparently helped him keep whatever demons put him there, elsewhere. I never saw his flipped switch and his contributions to group were muddy on the bloody details, but the long, straight lines and deep grooves in his head, neck, arms, and hands, were rather clear.

He was there that day, so I remember him in vivid detail. He was sleeping quietly with his pillow over his head when I reached for my phone and saw that you had texted me.

I cannot wait to see you.

Even at the very beginning, the idea of being near you was a speedball. I slept until sunrise.

An hour later I was walking towards the dining room, still four doors away when I realized that I could feel you walking beside me. Visiting hours were from breakfast to lunch, and visitors were invited to both catered meals, and I knew you were four doors away, waiting for me. But that didn’t change the fact that I knew you were walking beside me and I could feel you there, looking at me. I felt you there until the moment I crossed the fourth threshold and found you waiting, with your eyes still on me. Immediately, I forgot the four doors and your ghost haunting them.

You. And you were looking at me. The look which can’t be said. In the time it took me to cross the room and reach you, your posture, your expression, your gaze, never changed. Until I reached you and asked,

“Do I know you?”

and you held out your hand.

A few minutes later, while most of the floor wept and ate biscuits with loved ones, we sat on a bench in the courtyard just outside, a cigarette in your right hand and my left, your left hand in my right. We didn’t speak through the first two cigarettes. Some time later on the same bench, as the third round was being lit, you looked at me.

What did you say?

Give me your best impression of the light behind your eyes. When it burns out, what are you to do? A candle in the window will draw strays and runaways to the door, but best friends to the glass. Will you blink back to me through the black?

I’ve got longing down to shorthand – practiced, perfected, really quite pitiful. But there is a task for every talent, just wait until you get a load of mine.

Let’s blow this sad and sleepy party, light a fire beneath an eclipse that never says “good morning.” On paper, do you feel the smoke settling in layers across your body? Feel the faint and fucked up echos of things you have simply forgotten? If you don’t, don’t be alarmed. I remember.

What do you get for the girl who loses everything?  Patience? A plot? A mind? A temper?

You should know that I went back there, after. She came along a few times and got drunk while I looked around and got drunk. When she was there, I started noticing that I felt some kind of rush, like guilt. I only became sure of it one night after she left, then briefly returned. I said something which caused her to leave again, and the feeling eased.

I had not immediately processed the fact that the rush hit before I knew she had come back. There was something there with me. I went home, and she was there waiting.

Love, let me see you greenshift. I’ll make you famous in all the empty places and they’ll say “welcome, do not be alarmed.”

It isn’t home, but it’s closer than you remember. Do you remember what to do?

What do you think of all the things the universe feels?

If our bodies come from the world, then our emotions do, too. So who does it grieve for? Who does it love? What is it afraid of? Why is it angry? Why does it want to destroy itself? Why doesn’t it go through with it?

What is it capable of? Wouldn’t you like to find out?

Sitting on the trunk of your car, we watch the stars slowdance. Something happens. We could never have seen it if we had been looking for it. But we were. One says something, and looks the other in the eye.

Must it be?

I ask myself if you could imagine being unable to breathe, to sleep, to think, to feel, to rest.

Oh.

Being half-dead implies being whole and alive. “Crest implies trough,” I’ve heard it said. And I slide rather easily from perfect assurance to self-medication and back, standing in that threshold. But I’m working on it.

Alone, remember.

Liquor grounds me to the ocean floor. Too high, and I forget what I thought I lost and why I would stay here to look for it. Drowning is too easy and flying, only to come back down, is too hard. But I know a beach. Stop at the bridge and wait for me there.

Wait.

A boy fills a notebook with questions he wants to ask God, should they ever meet. He outgrows the practice and later moves out on his own in Hell. But sleeplessness and madness are the same anywhere and I have a page full things I am dying to know. And a gift, wrapped in a blank page.

For you.

the saline city received your signal on the thirtieth
and the accidental audience held its breath
the new may dawned in silence
with one insomniac avoiding two backwards calls to sleep

I still see you there, a remnant on the southern horizon
where ali and abbey first saw you
standing over venus, her face a ruin
a club in your left hand, her rib in your right like a knife
she had chosen the wrong soft chest to strike