03:48

 Awake again… 03:48. Thoughts ripple through the silence and then a solitary voice calls out in the distance. What are the others doing at this time? Are they sleepless, too, or are they arriving home from a party? Are they waking up to travel somewhere or to take care of a restless child? Of course, the clocks changed, we went one hour back, ‘an extra hour in bed’. That doesn’t really apply when one has been awake since a few minutes after 2am. 

                  I think of the scientist… how I gave so much love, and more, until she left to find more… to find younger, stronger, faster, richer. I think of decades earlier, the sportswoman, how I left because I was merely there to fill a gap but ridiculed by her rich circle of friends because I was not that… they were ‘adults’ buying homes, getting married, having children… I was in a punk rock band, spending my days with skateboarders and artists. I think of those who came after the scientist, those I hurt simply because I had finally given up and they were still hoping for lasting love. I’d learned too many lessons from London and Madrid, I’d met too many international travellers who had different perspectives. It’s ironic that it was Cambridge, Massachusetts that finally broke me. 

                  4am… haunted by words on pages and thoughts in stages. I get over the nostalgic thoughts of the scientist by thinking of the night she allowed a stranger to simply invade our conversation because he considered himself better than me or considered me not worthy of her, but clearly thought that he was. I’d expected her to reprimand him but, instead, she instantly melted into his hands. That was it, that was the moment I knew that I was done. No more hopes. It had been a beautiful dream, and that moment woke me from that blissful slumber. Since then, sadly, I have hurt people along the way because all I want is to be alone. Of course, I crave company, I crave excitement and passion, but, ultimately, I want to be alone. It seems that love is drama or confinement. There is envy or resentment or both. And I never felt the biological need to create more life.

                  And, finally, I am grateful, as always, for the beauty of literature and art… and as I lie here reading Our Missing Hearts, I am grateful for the fact that, for now, we are still free to create and to gather and to express ourselves without being taken out and shot. This is why I feel it is such a fragile time, two days from the midterm elections. What happens if a free and fair election is crushed or blocked in some way? Or if there is a dramatic diversion in the way of a war or worse? This is the slippery slope between being free to write words with weight at 4am or being dragged out into a big black van and removed from ‘good’ society.