Thoughtless Solitude

The clock by my bed reads 3:07am. I roll over and close my eyes in
an attempt to force sleep to come. It doesn't work. It really never
does. I push the covers off of myself as I sit up. My bare feet meet
the hard wood floor, damp and sticky. It's 86 degrees. It's August 9th.
Well, I suppose it's technically August 10th now, it being after
midnight and such. I stand with caution, as not to rise too fast and
make myself dizzy. I stumble out of my room and to the bathroom. I turn
the light on, knowing full well that it'll shock my eyes and cause the
instinctual covering of them with my right hand. But I do it
regardless. I always do. I wait a few seconds and remove my hands from
my face. I put myself in front of the mirror.


I take a long look at myself. Myself at 3:09am. I think,
"this isn't what I really look like." Then I realize that it is. Twelve
hours from now, when I'm at work in my ironed clothes and my Avon
make-up and my blow dried, hairsprayed, obsessed over hair, that's the
real "not what I really like" time in my exitence. Right this second,
this is me looking how I really look. This is as real as I can get.
This is what I look like, with no make-up to hide behind. Blotchy skin,
dry lips, dark circles and glossed over eyes. I turn off the light and
go into the den.


I sit down on the couch. I don't turn on the light, the
streetlights keep the room from being totally dark. It's hot, really
humid. I sit there in the dark and think. About absolutely nothing for
awhile, a long time I think. Then, as my mind enevitably does in these
rare and glorious moments of thoughtless solitude and emotional
freedom, my mind wanders toward inflection. I'm not sad, but I'm not
happy either. It's one of those moments in between, a pergatory of
emotion. Pergatory probably isn't the best word as it denotes
punishment. This is quite the oppoiste, these moments are wonderful. My
mind gets a little rest, maybe this is what people mean by clearing
you're head. Generally other people do it by going outside or having a
cigarette. Me, I sit in the dark in the middle of the night on my couch
sweating. It's August and it's 80-something degrees. At
3:25am.


I wander to the computer and giggle the mouse. The screen
wakes up and again my poor eyes are shocked by glaring fake light.
Again I sheild my eyes instinctually with my right hand. The shock
subsides and I breifly consider how history repeats itself over and
over again, on large and small scales alike, as I open Word. My mind
goes blank as the empty white screen glares at me and the cursor
screams at me to think and produce something decent. I distract myself
by changing the font size. I don't know what I'm doing, I should be
sleeping. I have work in the morning, and before that the gym. I need
sleep, I absolutely can't keep going to bed late, waking up in the
middle of the night and getting up at 6:00am. Sure I'm fine until about
2:25pm, but then I crash. I basically fall asleep on the job, I barely
talk to customers my ability to count money?well it's downright scarry
what happens at 2:25pm on days after nights like this.


I push my career woes from my head and look again at the
looming screen, full of endless possibilities. I laugh to myself at the
use of the word career. I'm a bank teller. If this is what my career is
going to be, I'm quiting my life right now. I guess that's why I'm in
college. But why am I failing out and graduating late if I realize it's
my ticket out of my present situation? Again I laugh to myself and
think it must be time to switch majors again. Again, fourth times the
charm. That's what they say right? And then something about being a
professional student??


The rain that we wipe from our car windshields today is the
same rain that fed the oceans and lead to the formation of the tide
pools where life on earth formed. This rain that we hide from under
embrellas is the same rain that the dinosaurs drank in the rivers and
the same rain that put out the fires after the comet hit earth and
extincted the dinosaurs. It's the same substance that our mothers
bathed us with when we came from the hospitals and the same water that
I chugged from a bright Orange Gatorade dispenser after rec basketball
games when I was 10. It's the same rain from one hundred years ago and
it's the same rain that will fall one hundred years from now. In this
world of disenchanted, disheartened, discriminating people who can see
things from their own narror perspectives and love to hate, rain binds
us all together. None of us can escape it, it's the same for us all and
it doesn't care whose rich, whose pretty or smart or whose president or
whose black or white or even human. The rain doesn't care, it torments
us and cleanses us and cools us all the same. Rain is the one thing
every living being on earth has in common.


I stop and reread what I've written, as the sweat beads on my
neck and my bare legs stick to the chair. I like it, I'm actually quite
happy with it. I have no idea where it came from or where it's going,
but it works. It works for me at least. I feel myself beginning to slip
back into thoughtless, emotional nothingness again. It is, after all,
4:12am. And I will be waking up again soon. I save my rain rantings and
wander into my bedroom. I crawl under the covers. It's 80-something
degrees but I have to be under the covers. How else can I sleep? I
laugh at that notion and turn onto my side. I look at the clock and say
a little prayer, more like a one way conversation. I start off on
something about my mom finding happiness and my newly enlisted cousin
not being sent to Iraq and my learning how to be satisfied with the
present. As I get into detail about how present satisfaction doesn't
have to detract from my dreams of owning apartment complexes and being
a renouned writer and finding lasting happiness, I think I fall asleep.
And I start dreaming, about what I can never remember.