A Thief In The Night: The Fall

After a month of having you in my life, your daily texts and phone calls ran dry and I no longer heard from you. Proposed plans of things we wanted to do together were abandoned like ghost towns. The dream had ended. It was an absence, a crime of the heart. There was no goodbye or anything resembling a goodbye. There was just nothing and silence as questions were asked to no one and as I answered those questions under the pretense of assumptions knowing full-well that explanations would never come to light. I cried for the loss, I drank for the loss, I told friends of the loss and I wrote music to the loss. I wrote an album that told of the most amazing girl that had entered my life for a short while only to leave like a thief in the night.

One night in particular, I reflected on the greatest of all the memories, one that was even greater than the first time I did the impossible and kissed the woman of my dreams. In fact, the greatest moment of all time in regards to the time I spent with you was the time when I held you as you slept in the darkness of the night, so close that I could smell that faint intoxicating scent coming from your hair, the strands softly grazing my cheeks. I was paying close attention to the details: the bridge of your nose, the arc of your lips, the occasional snore that you casually made. This was the one and only time that I truly felt like I had you. In short, it was the equivalent of basking in the radiance of God himself. I lied there helplessly in love and desperately trying to remember each and every fleeing moment at 3 in the morning, the seconds leaving faster than they arrived.

The night I remembered all of that was the night I cried, drank, and dwelled until I slept out of exhaustion and inebriation. I wrote powerful songs that told of the story of that lonely night, songs that I regard to this day as some of the best music I've ever written as a professional songwriter.

Months went by and the feeling of something missing never went away. A hunger that remained, a never-ending feeling of suspension. I wrote and wrote until there was nothing left to say. Love songs that you'd never hear, aspirations of a future where the years had gone by and our wrinkles were in bloom. I stopped chronicling after the desires and wishes became abhorrently redundant. I would never have you and the truth cut deep, silently, and painfully slow. I reluctantly decided that the time had come for me to move on. I might have never had you, but I got to hold you and kiss you like you were mine. If I was never going to experience that again, then what I experienced was going to have to be good enough to last forever.

There was nothing new and there was nothing more. It was, quite simply, the end.

I Lie In The Bed I Make: The Room

The imprint of a large elephant could be seen, one that had sat down in the corner for as long as it cared to stay. It stayed so long, I simply assumed its presence and went about living around it. I hardly ever addressed it, it was alway just sort of there. I never noticed its casual departure if indeed it ever truly left. If it did in fact leave, it left without a notable gesture. In its absence, it left a void in an otherwise dusty room in serious need of a talented and unattractive maid, as the more lovely ones only made it worse. The room was silent and unused, locked in a moment in time. I hardly noticed it catching up with current, more important life events.

I lie in the bed I make. In the middle, acting as a centerpiece of the past was a two-tier, frameless twin-sized bed with stubborn orange linen, a pillow with matching stubborn orange linen and another with clouds on a light blue sky. To top it all off, an extra large infant blue blanket that did its job, but needed to be folded over so as to not drag on the dirty floor. It was a getup that had seen numerous women, sheets that were slept in and washed, replaced and reused a dozen arbitrary times, stains that miraculously lifted of various bodily fluids, tiny little stitches in the fabric that were loose and expectedly torn through nights of shifting positions and stretching with the morning light, done so through the slits of a window shade, over a million units machine-cut, strung and shipped out of factories, sold at the local department store to make a common room feel and look like the very quick buck its Maker was looking out for.

A good a time as any occurred and the not-so-special reality-setting house lights turned on and bore upon the bed, the office-grade filing cabinet turned night stand and the thrift store dresser turned computer desk. Everything was covered in a thin layer of body hair. I am known for my hair and I know myself for the hair I shed.

At all times, the room carries the weight of both a hung jury on a murder trial and a rest stop off the interstate. It stares at you, it knows your secrets and it doesn't offer many places to efficiently hide them either. Although it airs out and looks like a sweaty and sleazy German, it won't repeat them to anyone because it knows that just as much as you need it, it sure as hell needs you. It longs for someone to laugh, cry, dash, dine, and grow in. A worried mother that harbors an unborn child, someone who doesn't want them to endure the hardships that everyone is destined to experience, and must. It was kind to me, but it prevented me from actually leaving it to venture out and meet people. It preferred me to stay indoors within its walls. It kept me in a shell and without very much self-confidence to go off of in the real world. I had a job that I went to for two and a half of the nine years I lived in it, but as soon as I would punch out from every shift, my first thought would undoubtedly be something along the lines of, "I need to go back to the room and make a new journal entry on my blog talking about my lukewarm day, having plenty of time to socialize with my fellow co-workers and friends. Sure, I got another layoff notice, but the hot girl that I work with wants to cheat on her boxer boyfriend with me. I'm sure of it." The room quietly looked over my shoulder and with the heat of the room, held me tight as I vented online. 

I am wholly convinced that, short of a poltergeist, it is a living and breathing entity alongside myself. It is the monster of doctor Frankenstein, and after nine years, I might as well have thrown down the lightning bolt myself. It makes suggestions and influences my decisions. It was a drag, but it kept me dreaming of bigger and better things. It was us versus the world. It breathed with the might and reverberation of every piano key and guitar string, every song I wrote in it's presence. When I recorded vocal tracks and spoke of the honesty of the time, it sheltered me and let me sing without mental barriers. It did not judge me so I did my thing like bacteria on a petri-dish. I sung my heart out through my lungs in a naked sweaty fashion and threw my fists around, a soldier in my own ongoing revolutionary war, for the room never failed to be the hottest room in the house at any given time. Droves of guests of both men and women took note of it. They complained, I relished.

The walls were a solitary confinement white, but because I spent so much time songwriting within them, I only noticed them by the silence that they brought. The room did anything but disappoint. There always plenty of silence. Even with the TV on and the noisy guests that my sisters brought over, it kept me in my own little world with hardly ever an interruption from downstairs. On some occasions, a phone call would snap me out of it or, pray tell, someone knocked on the door, not giving me a chance to come back to reality.