kids in the dark
vignettes
“A nice girl talks to everyone.”
Twelve faces turn to face her – “Cheers” – but this instead is what she hears. She thinks about these words all night as she watches the ice melt and lets memory trickle into her bloodstream. A nice girl talks to everyone. Then there was something in her inherently broken, and that is why she was singled out. Chosen. A girl deserving.
When she was five she cried in her mother’s arms. Hid under things. She didn’t know how to tell her that she saw her as a little girl too and that everything hurt, even the beautiful things. Especially those.
She felt she was waiting for an inevitable disaster that would split her life into a before and after, not understanding that there was no such thing as a beginning, middle and end, just time unending but contained, like a page folded over and over on itself, constantly creased by patterns that preceded it. This is what she thought as she turned the cocktail napkin over and over as if looking for a sign. She had a sudden vision of herself drinking the burning candle instead of what was in her cup and her insides turning to wax.
After he saw what he saw, he dreamed of long dark tunnels and the sound of his children opening doors, running through them, and splashing down into whatever was on the other side. He dreamed of speaking in languages he never knew.
He thought himself quick but knew time was faster. He understood there were many ways in but there was only one way out. He lived a story that only should have been told to him.
His phone was ringing, ringing. Memories curled in his mind like yellowed images and evaporated as he ignored the call again and again.
Yes, he thought to himself. This is what the end of the world would sound like. It would feel like getting high, like going to sleep. Maybe what love might feel like, if he knew. Like watching the rain turn to snow and night turn to day and suddenly finding a way to undo his sins forever.
But he did what he’d do – set both eyes fixedly ahead on a single unmoving unbodied end. Some nonreal destination that could be either success or total destruction. But either way, it would be pulling him like an anchor to the bottom of that sea.
He knew that. No matter what, deep down, this is something that he knew.
“That one is truly enamored by his own misfortune,” the woman said, rolling her eyes with a delicate snort. “I mean, come on.
I am looking at the world with new eyes. One girl at the edge of the world. Lately, I’ve been forgetting _____, and I’m becoming ________. This was an exercise my therapist told me to consider, as deeply and thoroughly of course as I consider all of her advice, so I’ve completed it. This bar is hot, wood-paneled and old, but necessary in a place that shuts down all winter. Grimacing, I remember wishing to be taken out of the city and rescued into the open arms of quiet nature. As if silence hasn’t been hanging like a dome or an echo chamber repeating the past back to me.
At night there is nothing, absolutely nothing. I stare at the wall and think about how boring sobriety is. I wish for anything, everything to change yet there was nothing I could do but think. So sobriety is over. It was never anything I wanted anyway. When my therapist asked if, given there was a way without consequence, money, or impact to physical health, would I be high all the time?
Yes, I told her. Wouldn’t you? If there was a way, wouldn’t you?
With everything in the world, wouldn’t you still be wanting? Isn’t that what keeps you, too, up tossing and turning in the middle of the night?
Brooklyn, 6:54 am