A little rusty, but here we go:
By the light of the refrigerator in the darkened kitchen, standing in the small pocket of cold air, boxer-shorted, deciding between cheddar cubes and grapes. Used to these hours, intoxicated by their slow evaporation, feeling the minutes pass as a tingling in my nose. Constantly verging on something, like a record or a CD skipping on the same note and waiting to fall back into the flow of the chorus. The anticipation held just so.
Cheddar cubes. Slam the door. Dark in the kitchen again. Dark and quiet. You learn, when you can’t sleep at night, that it’s rarely freight trains. People always talk about freight trains rumbling in the night. The whistles into the cold air. Or they talk about dogs barking from far away and the car alarms and sirens. These vaguely mystical dreamy sounds. Maybe rain pattering on the window.
The truth: in the hermetic sealed off apartment of late winter, there’s no noise other than the fridge and the running toilet. The soft, late night warm electricity buzzing through the walls, the vibrations in the floor. Better, for now, than the alternative: the hazy ruminations on unfairness and brevity when you can hear the blood pumping through your body in the silence of bed. When you can sense how tenuous your hold on the world, and how bound up in the blabbering of your own persistent memories, can actually seem. Eventually you’ll have to climb into the sheets. Ear against the cold pillow, feeling the slight sag of a mattress that you’ve moved from apartment to apartment as your career or your life or your something stutters to its inevitably stutter-heavy start. Where, exactly, does the world end and you begin? You can lose feeling in your feet if you try not to concentrate on them. They start to feel like just dead weight on top of the mattress.
How much of one’s life is spent searching for the cold spot on the pillow? Could we time it? Is that the kind of thing that you get to find out when you die? Cumulative minutes, hours, days, rubbing one’s head from side to side. I’d like to know. But then, how much of one’s life is spent searching for metaphors better than the cold spot on the pillow to describe the aching desire for something fresh and different? Or, by contrast, tracing the contours of someone else’s cold feet while they sleep next to you. Feeling their outlines press into your own, confirming softly: yep, those are feet, sure enough. And the curious circumstance of knowing what their feet feel like even while they are totally unconscious of them.
I yawn, scratch my ass. The toilet gurgles and the refrigerator motor dies. I decide to turn on automatic bill-pay for the electric company. Think about the tired trope of counting sheep. Then count some sheep, almost against my will and then, sonofabitch:
A freight train, rumbling off there in the distance toward somewhere else, unexpected, comforting.
