I thought I knew all the ways to be afraid at 3am
Indigestion #2
Hello, welcome to Indigestion, a semi-weekly column where I connect the dots of my life in ways that make my stomach burn. I appreciate you being here. I hope you stay forever.
Disclaimer: I talk about some dark stuff in this essay in a mindset I don’t abide by anymore. Do not worry for me, I am well. tw: suicide.
I thought I knew all the ways to be afraid at 3am but here you go reminding me all there is to fear beyond my own meager misery. You’re paranoid in the dark, peeling stickers off of household objects, on the floor like a child begging to be held so that no one might touch you. Got the lights flashing out on the street like it’s the fourth of july, but you don’t really wanna go, you just don’t want to be here. I’m worn down to my barest love and it’s thinner than the bones in your wrist. I’ve got a lump in my throat and you’ve got a dent in your thick skull. Who’s gonna face reality first? I’ll get fucked before it’s me, push my hips into your reluctance just to shut us both up. The odds say I’ll smother my horny, the evens say it’s best if you just leave. Un/surprisingly we built this hell without a door, now we’re staring at the walls like we’re the kind of boys who’d ever start screaming for help.
No one’s gonna let us out but the demolition crew of me and you.
Should I thank you? Here’s my hand being forced to call in reinforcements—you know I hate talking on the phone and here it goes ringing every thirty minutes, get those steps in pacing the lobby wishing I had a teleprompter to script my concern. Tell the story, mince the rhetoric, squash my fear-love-hate, take me out of the equation entirely. You’re the one in pain, what’s my sanity got to do with it? It’s just some 3am madness, it’s just another failure to cope, it’s no symptom of the bigger problem–this is the problem, this metaphor disguised as the truth.
I can nod with diligence. I can stumble through the motions. I can look the horror right in the face and not even scream. Who’s left to thank me? What’s the prize for my strength? No one can seem to tell me that all of this is worth it, that the other side will look any different from the side I just left. I could give it all up now and never trick myself into hoping again.
This is to say nothing of my sympathies. My heart is still tied to yours after all, just like I’d designed it to be, architect of my own failure as per uje (as per usual, but keepin’ it cool). I love you–that’s the obvious part. It’s why I put my face right up in yours, let my voice crack against your skin while I’m giving you the business. Who are you gonna believe but me? We brittle creatures made these false lives together, there’d be no us without the lies we choose to believe, that we wrapped around our hearts like bubble wrap. Pop! Pop! Pop! Hear that? That’s the sound of getting so close all that’s left is destruction.
Stepping from the Uber into the cold rain, we’re going our separate ways. Can you guess what time it is? I can’t afford a second Uber so I’m walking twenty minutes in the deluge like my body doesn’t matter. I shrug and laugh, everybody calls me a trooper. He looks at me under the streetlight like the straight man in the gay movie who doesn’t know what to do with his love or his pain, which are two sides of the same knife he’s always gutting me with.
We walk in opposite directions and he watches me over his shoulder to see me watch him over mine. If it was up to me, I’d catch my death from the wet air and let it live in my chest just to stand there looking at him. It’s the kind of awful romance I would imagine dying for, not because it’s pretty but because dying is the only way out.
I’m shaking when I get home. My clothes are an ineffective second skin. Strip for the mirror, watch my limbs press to the contours of my body like a starved cat. None of the love he’d held in his eyes seemed to stick to me in the downpour. But I text him home safe and he says Thank God. Love you. And that’s just how he is but it’s enough to rock me to sleep.
How many times has my everything began to unravel at 3am? Here’s the peak of the drunkenness–and by peak I mean the ditch that follows, but this was the destination all along: the summit I had to roll to the bottom of. Once the lining of the stomach has been dissolved, there’s so much space for tight-fisted hate, and the fun part is you can point it at anyone you’d like. Choosing myself is easy and I can do it over and over again, little punching bag sex doll with my baby blue eyes to boot.
I’m sturdy by design—until I lose my coat check ticket in January and have to leave the club pretending like my bones don’t bite at the cold like hounds and I’m telling someone I love that I want to kill myself. It’s true, but she shouldn’t say it.
I’m strong like skin scabbed over, scar tissue crafted with razor-like precision–until I decide I’m alone next to my best friends outside the casino where I lost $100 and can’t imagine him loving me. Then I’m blank like the emptied out gun I’d never purchase but think of often in the dark. I’m not in the void, but beneath it in the immense pressure of the deep sea with the nefarious anglerfish and the scavengers scuttling along the ocean ridges and aliens that drift on cold currents waiting for food to fall into their scary alien mouths. Little bits of tissue peeling off my pale body and floating away like reverse confetti; there it all goes toward someone else’s celebration.
3am is rancid. 3am is a labyrinth like an alley with two clear exits. 3am is me not asking for a cigarette outside the closed down bar, just holding out my two fingers like give me a drag or sit on these digits down to the base, I really don’t care which. 3am is the sort of laugh that bubbles up from the acid in your stomach: taste the burning of my esophagus in the thinned out air. 3am puts other people in the hospital but I can handle myself. 3am is looking up, the stars don’t care about me. 3am is I don’t care about me. 3am is what if I killed myself, like, as a joke. Wait, what’s the punchline? Will you finish it for me once I’m gone?
B’s got sharp cheekbones but they’re blunted by the pixels of his webcam; I’m round on and off screen. He’s skinnier than me which makes me want to hurt one or both of us. He lives in Pennsylvania and can’t seem to decide if I’m worth being attracted to, but we’re on Skype at 3am and I’m horny (i.e. hopelessly hopeful for some on-screen penis action).
I’m sixteen in my living room with the branches of the hydrangea bush teasing the window like perverts peering indiscreetly through the dark glass. Everything is delicate, watching my world begin to contract.
“Oh. Fuck,” I say to my lit up phone screen. I explain to this man on the other end of the Northeast corner of America the string of texts that is lighting up my phone.
“Damn,” he says. “You should probably call the police.”
And he stays on the video call with me while I do it. I’m reporting something an entire state away in the cold hours after midnight. Dispatch is confused and I don’t know how to tell them I’m choking on my panic, my whole body lit up like the letters on my keyboard. B just sort of watches. Him and his cheekbones are pretty unhelpful but I don’t know if I would have been able to go through with it without a witness to hold me to morality.
I’m clenched like one big muscle, worried they’ll send police to my house to make sure I’m not lying—I don’t know how anything works. But I guess they don’t do that so I just wait on camera and still feel sort of horny in a shameful way, like maybe I’ll get a prize for saving a life.
R texts me an hour later from the hospital to tell me that his stomach’s been pumped. His mother, who I’ll never meet, says she hopes to hug me some day and all I can think is how little I want to be touched by someone who is grateful.
At another teetering 3am far down the line, R and I will kiss like it’s something we wanted and I won’t know how to pump the shame from my own stomach, the needling knowing that I’ll keep making the same mistakes over and over again. I’ll hate every rotten muscle that brings my fingers to any cold glass, that bring the cold to my lips, that make my lips scream for contact even as the scream remains locked in my chest like glass breaking over and over against the soft tissue of my lungs, and I smile like I love it all. I could do this forever.
But my last 3am was the one with you on the floor and the barcodes torn up in shards stuck to your fingers and the lights pulsing outside and your dad calling you the wrong name. And me around the corner, hiding from the reality. I can watch the shadows warble on the wall but I can’t watch the flesh wrinkle and the eyes widen and the tall men patronize. You’re petulant in a crisis and it makes me want to cradle you like a child and whisper how hard it is to love you. Tell you baby, I’m sorry, you’re a pattern I repeat, it’s high time something ripped the stitching.
All of those moments with you stretched across adjacent 3am’s but I can’t seem to separate them, like multiple exposures on a single roll of film. Layered moments of constant distress, a turning point too obvious to ignore, but I tried. I stayed by your side and twisted the agony into devotion. Like when you’re on the playground swings at night and you wind the ropes up tight, it all comes untwisted eventually and then you’re spinning and the world’s a green-black blur and maybe you’re laughing at the sheer lack of control but the nausea always come and then there’s just agony.
And the kicker is, I got sober a few months before your head split like a cue ball. Thought it was the pinot that shaped the 3am spiral, but it was always just me running into the dark headfirst before it could come for me. Now I’ve got nothing to make the late nights worth it, no deep sea to drown in like running out of breath was always the point.
No more 3am’s. I don’t do that shit anymore. I can’t trust myself when the night whittles the possibilities down to the obvious mistakes that I worry might still turn me on to make, all the new ways there are to get scared in the thin hours that I’ve yet to discover. 9pm bedtime. If I’m out ‘til 1am at my age, I’m out of commission for the next week. Don’t expect much from me. Don’t put your suicide on my shoulders and I won’t bother you with mine. No magnetic gazing through curtains of rain, no 911 speaking in whispers so I don’t wake my mom, no setting my gut on fire just to see who gets hurt, no picking you up off the floor and taking the world’s most expensive Uber to your head scan.
I’ve got my limits. Last call at 11pm on weekends and if you’re too slow I’m already putting the stools up on the tables and running you out the door. I got a mind and body to care for. Take your late night misery and inevitable crises somewhere else.
But if you’re out late, tell me if they play that song we like. And text me when you’re home safe. If I’m awake in bed to see it, I’m too wrapped up in me to let you know.
jw
Creepy lights are burying you / And we are sure to spit right in the face of morning
What I’m Devouring
This is going to be a funny sentence, but I do mean it: I see Charly Bliss as the Big Thief of indie pop. And by that I mean they’re just a really cool band who have a lot of love for one another and sound like they were born to make music together. There are some misses on this album but I love these guys too much to care. There are a lot of reflections across this record about destructive youth that I think fit well in this essay. From Back There Now, a standout track: I would have stayed until the lights went out / forty stories ‘til I hit the ground / you couldn’t pay me to go back there now / so I tell myself / so it might come true. That’s kinda what this whole essay was, a harsh look at late night self-destruction that I have no interest in returning to, which I have to say over and over again until I believe it. Seeing these rockers live for the first time next week and will be a little shocked if I don’t write something about it.
A Creative Week in Digestion
In case you didn’t hear, because I still struggle to vocalize my accomplishments: I finished my novel last week. Less than two months of writing, about two chapters per week, I’m still a bit dizzy from the speed of it all. It’s a Frankenstein first draft, a bunch of big ideas really obviously stitched together, all the seams visible and garish. I’ve taken a solid week away from the story to let us both breathe and now the edits have started and I’m feeling vicious. No room for sentimentality, if the scene doesn’t fit, it’s a chop. Knowing now the story I was trying to tell the whole time helps. I’ve got another month and change to get a couple rounds of edits in before I start sharing the chapters online. It almost frightens me how excited I am. More on this very soon.
I made this cool little freeform piece last weekend. There was this really intense desire to combine my two side hobbies of collaging and flower pressing but I didn’t force anything and it all came out very intuitively. This was a lot of fun to make and I’m excited to see what else I can cook up in the intuition factory.
Some photos from a trip to Rhode Island to see my family this weekend:
This was so well written
Raw and probably difficult to publish. Great job conveying the emotions here. Always happy when I get to read something by you!