Sleepover
The gray Michigan winter howls outside, the shadows of cadaverous trees lay etched into the window panes, shaking and trembling in the night. The shadows of the branches are calligraphic in the wind. The wind buffets this tiny house, wriggling into the woodwork, whispering into our self-contained climate. I feel it blow along the halls of the house, trailing up the back of my neck, impregnating itself inside my clothing, edging into seams and assaulting my skin. It is the spirit of the winter, bearing down, filling my cold and sleepless lungs. And from the bed, in the night, sleeping not, I see the moon. Oh this moon, the pale beautiful flesh I see through the plate glass of a foggy window, it shines down, making ghostly shapes on the lawn outside. I watch the sky, like a bright city skyline, blinking in the codes of infinity, codes that when deciphered reveal the vicious machinations of these stars.
These stars.
These liars.
I turn back over. The real story here is I'm sleeping in this kid's bed. I'm sleeping over. It's night and I can hear him breathing heavily, breaking the room up into this respiratory rhythm, a shuffling of gasses. It isn't his fault, though I’d like to blame him, that I cannot sleep. I've never been able to sleep in other people's beds. it's just a thing with me. But as I lay there, watching him sleep—his face so peaceful like the newly dead, his breath shrouded in moisture, wet lips are parted to admit this exchange—I am struck by the beauty of the sleeping, struck by the effortless peace begotten here, tranquility almost by design but never realized or acknowledged. Thoughts like this, while not understood fully, make my heart race, make my blood beat vastly and rapidly. This is my new drug, inhaled slowly in the night, like a visual stimulus, a lullaby, lulling me to a sleep haunted by dreams of what were wished into a pleasant fiction. I wake up throughout the night; these dreams never last. They end at crucial moments, leaving me hanging, breath held, eyes closed, lips parted and neck craned upwards. I awake, the disappointing excitement of a dirty dream lingering in my stomach. I trace my fingers over his arm, laying comatose in the bed next to me, and he sighs, rolling over. In the night, I slowly wrap myself into him, like a secret setting up shop in his heart. I put my arm over him, nuzzle my head into his back and inhale his boyish scent. Luckily, he is a heavy sleeper.
Nothing ever turns out the way we had planned.
I get up and walk through shafts of moonlight that illuminate my insides, turning me into a silver skinned, swimming ghost. I get up and go to the bathroom where the yellow light brings me back, nearly grounding me. I look in my eyes, ringed by bands of fatigue, throw water on my face. Everything I told myself I wouldn't become is in the mirror. I squint viciously at him, wishing I could erase him, dig into history and weed the garden of memory and past thought. At what point do you start accepting your fate? When you've lost everything? Closing my eyes to avoid the boy in the mirror, I squint, blocking out everything. In the yellow bathroom light, in the moist and filthy atmosphere of this boy's adjoined lavatory, I masturbate breathlessly into the sink.
It is only afterwards that the real guilt begins to coil around me. On the cold tile I start to cry with the water running, masking my sobs.
The branches outside dance like grasping fingers in the wind.