Insomniac?
Blinding lights at midnight on a black desk in a room filled with darkness and I am awake for reasons only God must know.
My thoughts are foreign, yet somehow native in a time I should be sleeping. This darkness should be silent as she twists in bed behind me, but each key echoes through the room with anticipation and the monitor sets an eerie glow upon her back. Though these passages are not dedicated to her and I should leave her until she makes her rightful entrance, an entrance made from a white minivan. Yet somehow every word is meant just for her eyes because they form a mask which I remove daily.
I must move forward. I meant to write of the faces that haunt my past in the friendliest way they can. . .the faces of my dearest friends. It is not as if they have died, however, but merely that I have moved on. My life has changed and this change has brought with it smiles which feel forbidden and frowns that are sincere, but not in a depressing manner, more a manner which can only be explained in a fairytale sense. Or a sense of fiction. A sense I have grown fond of.
Still she lay there in a cocoon of feathers and polyester I am sure, or perhaps just cotton, a comfort we can recognize with a warmth that sometimes seems distant. So this must be about her. . .or for her. And, if so, I must find the correlation in the thoughts that ruminate inside of me in these sleepy hours.
I was on an airplane somewhere over the ocean when I remembered what life meant to me. The thought came to me after thinking about all the times I had to say goodbye and the promise I had made to my future friends about never meaning it. Somehow it was not a sad memory nor was it a sad prophecy, it just was. Life is a series of hellos and goodbyes with which we make ourselves comfortable. We fit in where we feel right, where we feel warm. Somehow we are all nomads and will remain nomadic in our conquests.
Though now I drift from my original topic, a thought about life and what it means. Perhaps I no longer know exactly what it means. After all, I was talking about something that happened many years ago. It was about a time that I woke up and told the lady who asked me if I had wanted a drink, “Yes, I would.†Then I drifted off to sleep. When I awoke there was a ginger ale on the tray table beside me, a seat that had been empty. I always ordered ginger ale on airplanes even though I did not like it. . .somehow the altitude made it tasty. That’s what it was – tasty. Life was a buffet line with all the flavors one could hope for. Today I would be changing from chicken rice to burritos. And somehow that made me feel uneasy, butterflies in the stomach.