2 am phone calls
Up late aching for that 2 am phone call.
You know the kind.
Yearning with a heart you didn’t know you still had.
I yearn with my teeth clenched through strange dreams.
I rail against the knowing that we never got close enough.
Now everything feels too late, and too far along. But maybe there’s a little crazy left in the tank.
What would you do to become unstuck? In that moment.
“Maybe you should go make someone else uncomfortable,” a friend tells me.
And I can feel something break down in that moment.
In reflections in windows, I see it too.
“He’s ugly,” she says. But a soulless kind of ulgy. A hopeless kind of ugly.
A concrete knowing, something never coming undone. Scathed and raw. Arching your back in the moonlight. Gross and misshapen.
I could scream in the light of a full moon.
Scream until your throat bleeds.
Does it even matter? What’s the difference now, between the good life you live and the sinful existence you want? What good is virtue if it’s a struggle for you?
Wouldn’t it be better to be real and rotten?
No one’s even looking.
Let em try it.
Like a gun to the head.
Some people don’t know. How close it really is to the surface.
Some things move in perpetual shadow.
I can feel my teeth aching for something to sink into. I can feel my lungs aching for something to soak up. I can feel my fingers itching for someone to caress. I can feel my eyes aching for lines to follow, contrast to discern, colors to bleed.
I can feel that 2 am phone call. I can feel silence coming down like storm clouds. I can feel something turning away in my chest.
Steeped in night. It seeps into my pores and mixes with the sweat oozing out, into the night air.
The lights. The sound.
Moving slowly, as though in a dream. Like when I was young, and I would wade into the surf.
Wandering around in circles that spell out nothing.
And then realizing, deep down, that nothing has changed. That you’re still the same.
On the train, the eyes like mine that look back. No words, no nothing.
I can lean my head back against the metal and feel every shudder and shake.
It’s just pain and then you die.
Until then, you’ll go on. Following it.
Something glimpsed through a door, a key hole, a window.
Something never spoken.
Something held secret.
Something held dear.
Forever.
And never uttered.
