The Mirror

Don’t open your eyes. Because I want to sleep. I want to close my eyes and leave this harsh reality behind. I want the world to crumble so that something beautiful can steal a piece of my mind. If I try to forget, maybe serenity will catch me unaware, wrap me up in its embrace, and never let go.

I’m just tired.

Every night. Every night of my whole life, this melodrama plays its overtired tunes. Keep my eyes closed, try not to think, try to concentrate on my breathing, on my heartbeat, on the sounds I hear, and then I try to forget. But the sensations never leave. I feel everything: the sheets rubbing against my skin, the mattress holding my body, my hair spreading across the pillow. No matter what I do, I can’t sleep. I can’t stop thinking.

I wrestle with the black sheets strapping me to my bed. One of my thoughts whispers some words through the window that never closes to secure my mind from the outside. As my hands bunch and punch the pillow beneath my head, images scrape their claws through the soft flesh of my forgetfulness, trying to tempt my soul to pursue them. Life never leaves.

But sometimes it fades. At the edge of reality’s plateau, my body loses sense of itself. My mind peers over the edge to look at nothing. The temptation to tumble into the numbing abyss overpowers every image that the world encourages me to follow. And then, from the deepest corner of my being, fear comes as a savior. That unlikely hero grabs my arm to keep me from slipping into that gorge. Because my mind forgets that if sleep has an end, we’ll land together on the rocky depths of our own reality to writhe in spasms of our broken imaginations, and if sleep doesn’t have an end, we’re beginning a fall into forever.

Don’t let either happen. I need to come back to you. Please let me come back. Nothing I conjure in my head captures the beauty of our poetically painted Euclidean world. Nothing in sleep feels the pleasure hiding inside the intensity of a waking moment. My fear pleads that I love being alive and I never want to leave. With a jerk, my ally pulls me back onto the mountain of the waking soul. And only then does sensation bring back the hideous discomfort I was trying to escape.

If my eyes open, that means this strict world inflicts its rules on my senses with all its rage. But I can’t hold out any longer.

The red lights from the broken numbers that make the digital clock ignite a swath of light across my face read 2:17. That clock is the mortal enemy of my tired soul. It hopes my eyes stay open. That way the beepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeep in four and a half hours can slice deeper slits through the semblance of my rest with greater malice than if I gave up on waking hours now.

I closed my eyes again, and I tried snuggling down into my bed because I just wanted to go to sleep, to find some peace, but sleep refused the invitation to my boring party. Instead, one of my random realities clicked to a channel that switched off the white noise that usually composes my mind.

The station showed a scene of me sitting on a bus years before tonight’s scene. Stretches of tape attempted to bandage the wounds from the children’s pencils that had scarred the green back of the seat that was creating a still life before me as my skinny adolescent body bounced to the bumps in the road. Nobody sat next to me because nobody was my only friend.

But somewhere in the back of the bus, real people had tangible friends. When I listened, I could hear them laughing. I smiled at the sound because laughter’s feeling spreads as a contagion, and I wanted to catch it. If people saw me laugh, they might tell me what they were laughing at. They might realize that I could be their friend. And they might invite me to join them simply because my smile was the piece missing from their puzzle. But I remembered that nobody laughed at my jokes, and that, before, when I’d turned around and smiled, only nobody noticed. Instead of turning around with a smile, I looked down with a frown so that somebody would notice something about me, even if it was only me staring at my own beat-up, old, black sneakers.

All of those kids knew what to say to somebody else. I only knew what to say to me. Alone, up front, letting everybody else laugh, refusing to greet the eyes of my peers as they walked past me to get off at their stops, daydreams plucked reality away from me. I would pretend that as the girls walked past, out of the corners of their eyes, they would steal a glance at me. And then, later, when nobody who wasn’t in love surrounded them, or maybe it happened when the girls sat alone together, when they retreated away from the guys who could never understand them or me… That’s it. It happened when, together, on the floor in a room, a group of awkward middle school girls crossed their legs and began to talk that they fantasized about the new kid at the front of the bus, the one who was so cute, who looked so interesting, who they wanted to say something to, anything to… HA HA HA HA HA. My daydreams disintegrate. I’ll never turn around. Don’t force me to watch them laugh.

I’ll sit here all alone. I don’t want any friends. I don’t need any friends, but my fantasies betrayed me. There was one girl with black hair. Black hair and dark skin. I needed her to want to know me. Amid all the other fantasies of those noisy people stepping off the bus, she lived as the only one who needed to exist because if she would talk to me, then friends wouldn’t mean anything. If her lips could push air into my ears, my heart would ease my thoughts, and she could make me never feel alone – forever a friend, something real in a world of falsehood.

So young and so lonely. So naïve.

And naïveté told fantasy that one girl could fill my empty soul, that one person noticing me, one person who mattered, would make me forget that nobody noticed. I was young (and now I’m just tired).

She was sitting somewhere behind me. I could hear her laugh. How did she make friends? Picturing her hair thrown back, falling below her shoulders, her lips smiling, laughing at the air, I smiled. Staring at the ground, bouncing with the bumps in the road, a tickle of inward pleasure caressed my lips and eyes, and I thought about turning around again, but I was too scared.

Footsteps were approaching me from somewhere behind. They tapped along the bus’s rubber mat. Can I make that person look at me? How does somebody see you? I couldn’t answer the question. Nobody sat silently next to me. Both wanted to help me, but both were trapped by all the insecurity, all the fear that kept me alone. I turned to look out the window.

Out there, outside, the trees brushed across the family homes. It all went by so fast. The blur faded into one long stream of white and brown peppered green as the road moved beneath the bus. That whirring world twirled into my head and created a fantasy of something that attracted my attention. I lost myself in the embrace of a landscape that was all my own.

The footsteps stopped (I guess I forgot about them), and something hit my head. I reached up to feel what was in my hair. In the blond strands that my mother always told me were so cute, a mass of sticky tape (the tape that bandaged the bus’s wounds) was wrapped and tangled. An eruption of early teen guffaws exploded from the real people with tangible friends who were sitting behind me.

So that’s what they were laughing at. They were laughing at me. They were laughing at what they were going to do to me. I was enraged. I turned around, snarling a frown, to see their faces, to confront this transgression. But all I saw was her black hair bouncing back to the smiling faces that pointed fingers at what my fantasy had done to my reality.

The tape stayed where it was (I didn’t care about it). I bowed my head (it felt so much heavier than usual). My lips trembled (why did she do that?). My breath heaved (don’t let them see your emotions). Tears were in my eyes (please, don’t let me cry). I silently screamed: I HATE YOU! ALL OF YOU…

The pillow was so thin. The blankets were so heavy. My thoughts had wandered too far, and they had come back to reflect on themselves in the heat of trying to fall asleep.

Children are cruel. I know that. And I know that in the real world, their petty cruelties mean nothing. But in their kingdom, amid the rules they invent, those games and jokes mean everything.

Why don’t they think about what they do? Why don’t they realize that everybody else is just as scared as they are? Why can’t they be the way adults picture them? And why do we picture them like that? We all start out as children. How do we forget that everybody starts out afraid of what waits for them in the darkness? How do we forget that everybody starts out alone and unable to communicate? How do we forget that we turn those feelings against our friends, acquaintances, and enemies because we don’t want anybody to know that we’re scared of letting them know what we don’t know? Why don’t we ever change?

My eyes burst open. “I don’t understand.”

A pack of cigarettes was resting on the shelf next to my bed. I flipped the top back, pulled out a tool of death, and placed it in my mouth. A spark ignited a slice of light. With a drag, I inhaled, and the tickling sensation at the base of my tongue was appeased.

Now, I was awake. Awake and thinking. I was so tired, but sleep never got rid of that feeling because sleep didn’t exist. It lived somewhere outside my surreality of darkness and outlined shadows.

I’ll stay awake. Just let me smoke this cigarette, and I’ll stay awake a little while longer.

I tamped the butt out in the ashtray. My throat burned. My breath tasted foul. I didn’t have enough saliva to wet my begging mouth. I went across the hall to the bathroom to get a drink of water.

In the hallway, it felt so good to be out of my room. It felt good to be out of my bed. Everything had been too small, too confining. The pillow had tortured me by lifting my head too close to the ceiling. The darkness had brought the walls closer than the light of day that expanded our separation. But once I left, it all felt a little bit better.

There was a doorway outlined in the darkness. I flicked my fingers across the wall to click the light on in the bathroom that stared back at my sleep deprived senses. There was a dirty wash basin, a book of poetry on the floor in front of the toilet, black shower curtain, black tiles, white walls, white ceiling… It all reflected into my disillusioned senses.

The walls’ reflections blinded my unaccustomed eyes. So I stared down to see my reflection in the patent tiles. I blinked, massaged my temples, and squinted as I walked over to the sink. It needed to be cleaned. It needed to be scoured of the remnants from other days.

A red cup was above the basin. I reached my shaking fingers toward the cup. I turned on the faucet. I put the cup under it. It filled with the splashing sounds of sinky, slapping water. And then, a leady, warm taste wet my burning throat. I filled it up again and took another drink from the fountain. Cooling my insides, washing my soul, the Lethean floods relaxed the thoughts that had tortured me when I was imprisoned in my bed.

Everybody needs that. Everybody needs a chance to taste something sweet and feel something soft. The water cooled every flame of hate that burned in me in my prison.

Resting my arms on the basin, I looked around for something to stare at for a little while before I tried going back to bed. I looked to the left, the right, up, not forward (not into the mirror), and down to the basin.

My hands were supporting me there. The left one was spread open, caressing the edge of my fountain. It was comforted, having somewhere to rest. My right hand was shut tight, angry at the moment of grace that the ledge offered me. Staring, meditating on the open fingers of my left hand, watching the ligaments and veins that lived below the surface (something I only had hints of, no proof other than the vague outline), I remembered another time when my hand had lain outstretched like that.

Then, it had been on a small, round table, on a piece of paper on that table, years before any tape had been stuck in my hair. So many years ago.

Children had laughed. Scissors had snapped open and closed. With a calm voice, the teacher had spoken soothing directions from somewhere behind the table that the hand that I was staring at was resting on. I had had to spread my hand as wide as it could go, to trace it, to make the feathers for a turkey on a Thanksgiving card.

My lips were pursed. So that my fingers wouldn’t move, I tensed my left arm until it trembled, and my fingers moved anyway. They shook so very slightly. And you could see those tremblings in the shaky outline that I cut of myself.

That card made its way into my mom’s hands. What words had that child who had grown into me written? I can’t remember. Something about my mom and my dad and our dog and our home…

But I know I was thankful. I was grateful, full of love and hope. My mother’s eyes must have lit softly with tears when I presented her that card as a gift for making me live. She must have smiled that beautiful smile that seemed so all-encompassing when I was young. And she must have felt something warm inside herself at seeing a manifestation of my love because I know that I had meant whatever words I had written. And I know I must have smiled the broad smile of my childhood when my mother probably said thank you as she turned slightly red and kissed me on the cheek. Then, I must have turned around to go somewhere to play until the feast that night. I don’t remember the words I wrote, but I know that I was a child who was happy to be alive.

We still have that card somewhere. I saw it not too long ago. It’s hidden, buried under years of collected debris. But it is still somewhere. My hope was saved forever. My love is eternal. I just don’t know where we put it.

I wish I did. I wish I could read those words again and remind myself of what I had thought. Remind myself what it meant to love purely. A child.

Staring at my left hand, lost in remembrances of what love had meant, trying to remember something if it was anything, a half smile crept across half my face. I looked in the direction of that smile, and I was looking at my right hand.

My closed fist. The pieces fit so tightly together. There wasn’t room for anything else in that palm. My veins reached around to strangle and misshape my smooth skin. I stopped smiling. I brought my fist to my face so I could look at it closer, as if its proximity would help me make sense out of it.

Turning it around in front of my widening eyes, this way, that way, looking at the indentations in the flesh, the protrusions of the knuckles, I noticed that one knuckle was missing, and I remembered why. My rage had destroyed it. My rage had pushed it back to be lost somewhere inside my hand. I had hit a tiled wall. Nobody had talked to me. Nobody had noticed me. And I slammed that piece of myself so hard against something unbreakable. I remembered then that sometimes the tiny bones in the base of that fist popped out of place because they had never healed from the act of destruction that had shattered their strength.

When I hit that tiled wall, I didn’t realize that what I was doing was irreversible. I just knew that something had to get out from inside. I didn’t know how to say it, how to tell it, how to convey it, but it had to get out.

Behind me, everybody was laughing. They were having fun. They were talking to each other and making sense out of everything that was happening. Sometimes, they tried to approach me, smiling, reaching out their hands, but I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know how to let myself out of myself. I wasn’t able to keep it in any longer, and I hit that wall. I screamed, and then I hit that wall. Everybody turned around, dropped their jaws, and stared.

But I don’t remember why I was so angry. I must have been about thirteen. What had happened to that child who was grateful for his mom, his dad, his dog, and his home? Why hadn’t I been able to run off and play until the feast that night?

I should be able to remember. You’d think that I could remember rage, but it must be buried along with that remembrance of love that I can’t find anymore. Maybe wherever that card is we put something else that could make my hate real. Then, that anger might mean something other than a simple reminder of being scared and trapped away from everybody else.

I closed my eyes again.

I needed the world to not be so bright so I could see inside myself (maybe then I could remember all the secrets that my hands hid so poorly), but all I saw was darkness. I shook my head as if I were trying to clear away the incessant nothing that existed inside of me. My thoughts were simply left to contemplate the dichotomy that existed between my hands. I rolled and turned my head as the darkness crept closer to my mind. Overpowered by my vision of nothing, I quickly opened my eyes and found myself staring at the one thing I didn’t want to see: The mirror.

– Don’t look there! Not at that reflection of so much of you! What do you want to see there?

I panicked. I looked to the side, but before I escaped, the contours of my ear stole my gaze.

I love you.

Where had I heard that sound before? So many breaths had materialized the air into that sound. A girl’s voice crackled across a phone line: I love you. Good night.

Her words had traveled miles to spark the smile that had put me to bed, that had let me sleep. I slept that night amid visions of her breathing those three words: I – Love – You.

Those words had floated into my stomach, caressed every organ, and let me rest in her arms of breath. Sitting in a chair, hearing breath I couldn’t see, some feeling had comforted me. Who was the girl who said that? Where was she now that I needed to sleep? Where were those words now that I was so tired? I can’t remember anything.

If I can’t remember where we hid that card or why I hit that wall, maybe I could at least remember her. I remember. My face tightened. I remember I stopped believing those words. There was another sound, one that I remember better. What was that one? I remember: I hate you.

She had said that too. Hate had torn through the same phone line that love had floated through. Hate had attacked the same ear that love had caressed. Hate had exploded inside of me with the same amount of force that love had had to calm. She eventually hated me. She did something, or I did something, or God did something, and love turned to hate. It can do that, you know. It happened with her.

I tried so hard to reach across the gulf separating our bodies to give her my voice, to let her understand my thoughts, and her spit flew back with hate to slice away a piece of my heart and let it fall to the bottom of my stomach where I was never able to digest it. All I needed was to hear three words. Reality turned that into an unholy trinity, the inversion of my rest.

Her hate hid with my lost love. My hate materialized in her mistaken love. Why did I hit that wall? What happened to my Thanksgiving card? How come children are so cruel?

Love turns to hate. Hate perverts love. Whichever way you want to see it, it means the same thing. It either means something, or it means nothing. This is real. That isn’t. How do you know which is which? Only by words, but you can’t know if the words are real when they’re never tangible. You can never know which to believe because the existence of both in the same person is a logical impossibility. You can only trust that air means something, and it’s so hard to trust (I don’t want to think about any of this).

The memories singed my mind. I tried escaping before the sparks burst into flames. I turned my eyes to flee down and out the base of the imprisoning mirror because I needed to run and hide in the distorted vision of myself that appeared in the black tiles. The mirror made everything too much like it really was.

– Just get away from the mirror and go to sleep.

I tried a new angle to get my eyes away from the mirror, but before I was free something else stole my gaze. My eyes stopped right above my thin, skeletal chin. My lips protruded from my face just like my words protruded from me. Something about glimpsing the mechanism for my voice demanded my attention.

Those are my lips, I thought. Those lips speak my thoughts. My heart sunk into my lungs. Those lips have formed the same words that everybody else’s have. I wanted to cry.

I tried moving the muscles that produced those sounds just to see if I could do it. My skin felt like it was cracking. My jaw felt tight. It felt like it hadn’t moved in so long, too long. Trying to see if my face could mold into what had floated sightlessly across a phone line, I opened my mouth backwards to horrify my sight with the unspoken sounds: I – Hate – You.

The reflection of those bitter words rattled the mirror’s smooth surface.

Once, when I was sitting in a chair, my mother sat across from me. She had a pursued look on her face. I felt so trapped. Nothing could reach out from me. Every thought was strapped to the chair that held my body. Confused, lost, abandoned by myself, the bones at the base of my right fist popped out of place whenever my hand moved on the armrest.

Where is everybody? I asked myself.

They’re all outside of you, I responded.

My mother and I were talking about something that day. She had just told me something that aggravated the ulcer that my stomach acids had produced when they tried in vain to digest my heart. Staring at the blank walls and the sterile tiles, I wanted to run outside and play, but I couldn’t. I was too old. So I sat there. And then, my mother saw my muscles work the same contortions that had just distorted my reflection. My mother heard my tongue click against my teeth to make the final “t” in that disgusting word. She dropped her head forward, closed her eyes, and cut herself off from my rage. She responded with silence. Consumed by the flames of love’s waters, I drowned inside the silent expanses of my head.

And then, when I saw that image reflected, I refused to believe it any more than she had. I never meant those words. My eyes blinked back open. Mesmerized by the contours of my lips, I felt the need to maneuver them into a different shape.

If that wasn’t what I meant, if that wasn’t true, then let me try to say it now. It was hard. My jaw was heavy. The muscles didn’t work very well, but my struggles resulted in a new form: I – Love – You.

I mouthed it again, one more time just to make sure I could do it: I – Love – You.

My lips grew into my entire vision. My thoughts couldn’t focus on anything other than the muscles producing those shapes. I’ve said that to my mother, too. I said it before and after I said the other combination.

Crying tears that burned away the layers between my thoughts, my lips melted into my teeth to reveal my sincerity. I meant it. When I said those words, I didn’t know how or why, but I knew they were true. She knew they were true. She said the same thing to me, and all our tears were forgotten. My hatred dissipated into the fog of our cigarette smoke. Something else took its place.

Maybe hatred was only a distortion of love, a mistaken registration of thought. Maybe love was true…

How can you know anything is true? I’ve said words so many times. Too many times to believe myself anymore.

There was a girl, not the one with black hair and dark skin, not the one who had crackled across the phone line, but a different one. She had watched my lips struggle into that shape, and then, her lips had reached out to mine to consume the power of those words. With a ferocious longing, she had tried to use her mouth to pull those words into her soul.

She spent the whole day at my house, lying with me between those suffocating sheets. When she left, when her back faced me from the other side of the screen door, I realized I hadn’t meant what I’d said. I walked away from our last embrace and sat down. I rested my temples between my fingers. I closed my eyes, and I mouthed those other words: I hate you.

I said that to me, to nobody other than me.

Who did I hate and what did I love? How can I know what’s real when you’re so cruel, and I can’t trust myself? Is there anything that means something?

My hands were real because they were physical. They showed the truth. What my ears heard was only air, but the air was made of matter, and that made it real. My lips spoke my thoughts. My thoughts materialized as words…

It didn’t make any sense. I must have meant something real, something true sometime.

The mirror never moved. I must have looked too long and too hard at it because, somehow, I gave life to something like my thoughts, and I shouted words that had no air to breathe: “Look at me! If you want to know what’s true, if you want to know what’s real, then look at me!”

“I don’t think I really want to know.”

“Yes, you do. If you didn’t, you never would have stayed.”

“I didn’t want to. I tried to leave, but you trapped me.”

“You trapped you.”

“I want to go to sleep.”

“How do you expect to sleep when you’ll never look at me?”

“I’ll close my eyes and let my thoughts fade into nothing.”

“How can you escape what you’ll never face?”

I refused to believe that accusation. I bellowed against the trap that was supposed to be my relief, “Let Me Go To Sleep!”

I raised my eyes to confront the mirror’s unending stare. It answered me with its gaze.

Its eyes were so much softer than I had expected them to be. Envisioning them, I’d thought they were angry, set on fire by rage and hate, but they weren’t. They sparkled with tears that hadn’t yet cried themselves away. Do you love me? they seemed to ask.

“I don’t know what that is, but I know hate. You’ve seen it. You know it.”

I reminded my eyes of something they must have forgotten:

“Do you remember when we were downtown that night? You were looking at the trash littering the streets. The bums were begging for change so they could get more liquor. A fat man dressed as a woman was selling calendars of himself dressed in lingerie. There was a strip bar on the corner. That was where all the men hung out. The pierced punks strutted past you. The gangsters were checking their pagers. A skinny crackhead slithered over to a payphone.

“You were waiting to go inside a café and look at a book while I drank coffee and talked and listened to friends. I heard an argument. There was a man and a woman yelling at each other. I turned around so we could look at them. Do you remember what you saw?

“They were people you knew. They were faces that were familiar. You loved them. They loved you. And they loved each other. But they were arguing. They were yelling. Spittle flew off their lips. Their hands flailed. And then, he hit her.

“Do you remember that? He hit her, and he threw her into a wall. Her head careened into that wall, and her hair spilled down to stick to the tears that dripped beneath her hair. Somebody else threatened him. He ran, but I stood there motionless. The lips you just stared at opened, but nothing came out. We were friends. They were more than friends. They were in love that meant nothing. Do you remember that?

“Do you remember that he came over to our house one day? That he begged me to forgive him for what he had done to our friend? But I told him that he had lost our trust.

“He bowed his head forward, but he never apologized. His eyes just filled with tears as he pulled his hands off the window of the truck that he had pulled up to our house in when he had still believed that somehow he could quiet my hate. I never spoke to him again because it’s so hard to trust. Do you remember that?”

My eyes looked back. They were searching for a response. They couldn’t argue with my example. They remembered seeing all of that. They remembered hate.

But, they asked me from somewhere deeper than the surface of their tears, Why can’t you remember other parts of that story? Why can’t you ever remember that you never forgave him but she did? She went back to him, and you stopped talking to her because you said that you wouldn’t let us watch the results. She left him again and came back to talk to you, and she brought the result with her.

It was a child. A baby boy with soft hair, a sweet scent, lips that made their own language, ears that couldn’t understand what you said, and eyes that were wide and innocent. You played games with him. You folded his tiny hand into yours. Enamored by everything, he crawled across the living room floor. We watched his mother smile when you told her how beautiful he was. He started to cry, and your friend reached down to pick him up. She rocked him and talked, almost silently, to him. It was something soft, something sweet.

“You’re my best friend,” you told her. And she said the same thing to you. Then she left, carrying the fruit of, the truth of her love in her arms. Do you remember that?

I did. I do.

Inside my pupil, my entire face was reflected. For the first time that night, in the blackness of myself, I saw all of me. I had two ears, two lips, two eyes, but only one face. Shocked by the revelation, I stumbled backwards.

What happened to my Thanksgiving card?

The bones in the base of my fist popped out of place as I reached up to turn off the light to let my senses plunge back into the darkness.

I’d looked too long, and I didn’t know what to do.

Why did you do that? Why can’t you sleep? Most people sleep. Nobody needs to occupy themselves with a mirror. Why did you do that?

I don’t know, but now I need to sleep more than I ever did before. The day will be here before too long, and I’ve been awake forever.

Tumbling into my bed’s prison, I greeted the mirror’s images. My thoughts were dark, tired. Just forget. Focus on your heartbeat, the sound of your breathing. Forget.

I can’t. I’m right back where I started, except that, now, it’s all too real.

Keep your eyes closed. Don’t open them again.

I won’t.

Don’t open your eyes. Because I want to sleep. I want to close my eyes and leave this harsh reality behind… I just wanted to go to sleep and find some peace, but sleep refused the invitation to my boring party. Instead, the mirror left me with one final reflection.

It must have been the mirror because my self never wanted to see this sight. So many times, my ears had disregarded what they had heard. My mouth had disregarded what it had said. My eyes had disregarded what they had seen. But tonight, my reality met my thoughts in the midst of a bright light reflected by some memory of a stream that collected my debris.

I had to open my eyes. I had to look because I couldn’t avert the steady glare of myself.

They opened on a scene of a child who played with toys in the security of a room that he thought was his. The floor was littered with the tools of his innocence. His small hands, scarless, flicked the spinner on a contraption that his father had made. Lost in the security of those fantasies made real, the boy sat on his knees contemplating the vast expanse of the world made perfect because his parents had allowed him to name and number its parts as his own. Everything had come from them, but love had made it all his.

He played to pass the days, and he slept in the security of his parents’ home underneath the watchful eyes of twinkling, twinkling little stars.

There was a knock at his door: “Michael, could you come into the kitchen. Your father and I need to talk to you.”

Scratching his head, the boy stood up. He looked at his toy friends sprawling across the floor. “I’ll be right back,” he told them, and he walked into the kitchen.

The overhead lights lit the white walls with their unearthly glow. In the middle of that blinding light, the boy’s mother and father sat at a kitchen table with their legs crossed. From an overfilled ashtray, blue cigarette smoke twirled into the air. His parents looked so much older than when the boy had last seen them the night before. His father’s massive body had somehow tapered into a shade of how he should have appeared. His mother pursed her lips and squinted. A dog wagged into the kitchen to nuzzle its nose against the boy who was its best friend.

Silence.

His father stared at the walls, at him, then back to the walls.

His mother rested one arm across her chest. With her other hand, she pulled at her lip. She stifled a slight cough, breathed in deep, and said, “Your father and I have something to tell you.”

Trying to act as if the silence and the seriousness hadn’t startled his mind of make-believe, Michael scratched behind the dog’s ear, but he knew that a momentous fate was about to befall him in the next exchange of words.

His dad looked at him.

Michael drew himself upright. He was suddenly conscious of the cold seeping in through the floor. If I’m strong enough, nothing will hurt me, he thought.

His dad said, “Michael, I’m going to be leaving here.”

Michael didn’t move. He looked up at the ceiling. It didn’t fade away like those words made him hope it would. Some sort of heaviness lodged in his throat as his tears tried to suffocate him. All that he was able to say was, “Okay.”

“Your mother and I have been talking…”

(Is this true? Please, Mom, tell me this isn’t true.)

“And we think that would be best,” his mom finished.

(This isn’t real. None of this is true.)

“Okay.”

His dad spoke again: “Don’t be… don’t be… angry. Don’t blame yourself.”

(Who else can I blame?)

“It’s only circumstance.”

And it was his mom’s turn. “Your father and I both love you very much. We just need some time apart from each other. Not you.”

“Okay.”

Michael wanted to get away from them before the lump in his throat moved into his eyes to force tears to stream down his face.

His father said, “So, I’ll probably be leaving first thing tomorrow morning.”

(So soon?) “Okay. I’m gonna go back to my room now.”

Father: “All right. I love you.”

Mother: “I love you too.”

Michael: “Okay.”

And he turned to walk back to play with toys that he didn’t want to play with anymore. Panic and fear and rage and pain rushed over him, nauseating him. As soon as he closed the door on the dog’s nose, his tears rushed forth from an ocean that must have dug itself during that short conversation. The expanse of his room was suddenly a prison that he had to escape, but there was nowhere to go. It was all real.

His mom came in a little while later. He didn’t say much to her. His dad slept on the couch that night. He left the next morning…

My eyes burst open. I shot up in my bed. I reached up to rub the remnants of that vision from my sight. I lay back down. I closed my eyes. But it was all too real. The mirror had reflected back every portrait of itself, and I couldn’t do anything other than lie there as emotion after emotion washed across me.

My stomach tightened and tried to tear itself out of a knot. A spike drove through my skull, but my thoughts didn’t stop. I squeezed my eyes tight together. A high-pitched, nearly inaudible cry escaped through my lips that I couldn’t close all the way. Doubling over, I slammed my hands against my temples to try and stop the maddening sensations that existed somewhere inside of me. For a moment, all my thoughts stopped. Then, they flooded back again, drowning me. I struggled back to the surface.

I whispered, “Why does it hurt so bad? I can feel it in my stomach, my throat, my eyes, my head. Why does it hurt so bad? This is terrible. This is horrible. Just let me get away. Let me escape. This is the worst it’s ever been.”

Flailing through the sheets, I jumped out of bed. I knew the cigarettes on the shelf couldn’t help anymore.

“Why are you doing this to me?” I shouted. “I can’t live like this anymore. I’m so tired. I can’t live with my thoughts. I want to sleep. Help Me!” My hands were pressed so tight against my head it was like I thought I could force God to pop out of there and give me some sort of answer.

I cried, “Why am I alone? How come children are so cruel? Why does love turn into hate? How can I trust myself to speak the truth?”

Nobody responded.

I tried to filter out the tears that had never been able to become real. My jaw tightened. My head felt like it was going to explode. I wanted to bleed my tears out through my flesh, to make some sense out of tiny drops of red. Looking to my right, at a wall, drawing my fist back to slam it so hard against something unbreakable…

“Do you really think you’re alone?”

I froze. I… I didn’t really know what to say. I’d never expected an answer, but I whispered between my grinding teeth, “Yes. Yes, I’m alone. I’m so fucking trapped. I’m so fucking lost. And all that ever happens is that my lost love comes out as hate because I don’t know how to tell anybody how much I love them.”

“Why don’t you try one more time?”

“Why? How? I can’t do it. I can’t do this anymore.”

“Spit it out. Spit it all out. Face it, feel it, then turn it around and tell it.”

Sitting there, I suddenly discovered how to tell all of you how much I love you.

My cigarettes were resting on the table next to my bed, but I didn’t need to spark the match to bring me closer to death in order to light a little piece of my world. I wandered through the darkness to a desk where an empty notebook sat. It had sat there since I had shown up in this place after my mother had given it to me as a gift for graduating from high school, as a symbol for recording my life from the beginning, a gift from my mother at a time when my life had become mine.

I flicked the switch on a light that illuminated the empty, white pages. They burst into existence. The world became bright. I grabbed my pen in my right hand. The bones at the base of that fist still throbbed from turning off the light on the mirror.

I don’t know if I finally fell asleep or if I really woke up, but I know that I opened my eyes a little bit, and I saw that I had finally begun my fearful fall into forever. I wanted to rip my heart out and smear it across the page to bleed a tiny thought onto the beautiful, blank paper.

“I love you,” I whispered to everybody: to me, my mom, my dad, our dog, the girl who had stood behind the screen, the girl who had hated and loved me, the girl with the black hair and dark skin, real people with tangible friends, my best friend, her child, his father, and even my oldest friend, Nobody.

As my tears dried into salty crevices on my face, I started writing while the sun rose to shine its golden light through the window that never closed to secure my mind from the outside.

By Michael Anthony Adams, Jr.

From his story collection Notes from the Idle Mind.