3 AM
Where is your mind at 3 AM? Thanks to Jas and Nneoms for their help. Keep an open mind.
-SET
The weight of the world hangs upon his shoulders as he sits at the edge of his bed, hunched over. The glow from the phone bathes his face with a soft luminescence in the midst of the darkness that has swallowed his room whole. His thumbs hover over the screen, poised to take the journey he has thought about so many times. He’s always been a thinker, an overthinker, and not much of a doer. This is why he sits, with the weight of the world upon his shoulders threatening to fold him into himself, a place that rests precariously on the edge of peace and pain.
This is not the first night he has spent like this. Some nights he paces, some nights he writes, some nights he just sits. One night, he cried. The tears were not bitter or angry, but rather the leakage from a dam filled to the brim with unresolved emotions. The common thread throughout these nights were thoughts of her. Melody. Some nights were memories and others were fantasies but she was a constant, in the unsteady ocean that composes a young man’s mind.
Tonight will be different, he tells himself. His thumbs slowly press the phone, taking him to her name, taking him down a path with an ending unknown. He types out “Hey, you there?” and sends it. He drops the phone by his side and with the strength of Atlas, stands up and walks to his window. He looks down at the sleepy street below and starts to wonder if he’s made a mistake. Panic and doubt come creeping in like two snakes ready to wrap themselves around any shred of confidence they can find. He steadies himself as he runs his fingers through his closely cropped hair, taking a deep breath, steeling his resolve. He pauses for a moment as the moonlight washes over his dark brown features, then returns to his bed to sit and wait.
She has just gotten her breathing under control. The anxiety attacks make it hard for her to sleep and they have started appearing more frequently as she faces the prospect of her future. Her phone vibrates and she checks the screen. Marcus. He’s one of her closest friends, if not her closest one yet she hasn’t figured out how to tell him about the attacks. She hasn’t figured out how to tell anyone. She contemplates on whether she wants to reply, not sure if she can handle a conversation with anyone right now. Sleep has been hard to come by, and she’s grown accustomed to the quiet solitude that night brings her. She mulls it over and decides to reply. “Yeah, I am. What’s up?”
With his mind racing in a hundred different directions, the vibration of his phone snaps him out of it. He can’t help himself as a small smile escapes from his lips. He stands up from the bed and starts walking around the bedroom, while typing his reply. “Nothing really. Can’t sleep. Just thinking.” He sends it and the waiting game continues.
She sips the water while absentmindedly rubbing her thumb over the burn scar on her knuckle. She was 7 and reckless when her older sister had dared her to put her knuckle on the hot stove for four seconds. She didn’t want to be called a baby so she did it and she cried a bit and her mother had given her a couple firm whacks on her ass but she wasn’t a baby. Her phone screen lights up and she looks at the reply. He was forever thinking, constantly floating out of this world into whatever world he had constructed in his head. It was common for her to jolt him out of a daydream in the middle of a conversation. “Thinking about what?”
“You.” He quickly types the reply, then deletes it, then retypes it, then re-deletes it, and stares at the phone. He’s afraid of scaring her off and that could be the thing that breaks him. He simply can’t bring himself to say it so he types “Fear.” and sends it to her. It’s not a lie because fear seems to be lurking in the back of his mind whenever she’s around, but it’s not the truth he wants to tell. So he sits with his fear, and he waits.
“Fear?” she whispers to herself. It wasn’t an answer she was expecting. She’s become quite accustomed to fear lately. The uncertainty of the future lies in wait and she doesn’t know how to approach it without losing her breath completely while her heartbeat rapidly rises, putting her on the edge of consciousness. She misses the days when she was younger and fear was as foreign to her as snowfall in summer. “Why fear?”
“Why fear? Maybe because whenever I’m around you, I can no longer think straight because I’m daydreaming about us buying our first house and having kids together. Maybe it’s because I’ve been too fucking scared to tell you how I feel because I’m afraid it’s going to ruin one of the few stable friendships I have and leave me feeling lonelier than I already am. Maybe it’s the fac-” He takes a deep breath and begins to delete everything he just typed, cleansing his truth from the screen.
“Idk, fear is just fascinating to me. The way it can control our emotions, and either push us to greater things, or cripple us. Tell me something you’re afraid of.”
She sees his reply and wonders if this is an outlet for her. A chance to finally tell somebody what she’s dealing with. She’s never been good with talking about her feelings. She was sixteen when her sister died in a car accident and she never really talked to anyone about her feelings. People came to console her, and would ask how she’s doing but how do you tell someone that it feels like a part of you has been permanently ripped away and you don’t think you’ll ever be whole again? The most they can offer is a pat on the back and some empty platitudes and who is that going to help?
“I’m afraid of tomorrow. And the day after that, and every day after that. I’m afraid I won’t get a good job. I’m afraid I’ll let my parents down. I’m afraid I’ll let myself down and it’s not the fear that pushes you to greater things, it’s the crippling kind and I’m sick of it.” She sends it before she can think twice and delete it.
The light from the fridge shines in the otherwise dark kitchen as he searches for something to eat. He settles upon an apple when he hears his phone vibrate against the kitchen counter. He shuts the fridge and sits down to read her reply. He had been expecting something generic like spiders or snakes, not this. He never really had to worry when it came to getting a job. Offers were rolling in before he finished his final year of university. He’s starting at a software engineering position in a month’s time. He’s not quite sure how to reply. He’s stuck in that weird space where you want to comfort someone and reassure them without sounding cliched or fake. How do you convince someone that tomorrow is going to be okay? He thinks about taking the route which says that the future is fucking scary and that’s simply how life is, but what good does that do her?
“I know how you feel. Life is just scary in general and we don’t know what tomorrow will bring, but you’re so smart and talented that I know you’ll get a job soon. You’re not going to let anyone down, especially yourself. Stay strong because you’re not alone.”
He’s afraid to hit send because he doesn’t know if his message will connect in the right way but he does it anyway. He wonders why no one told him that uncertainty is a prerequisite for growing up.
Back in her bed, with music softly playing, she sees his message. She smiles a little. He’s cute. He’s always been cute. They’ve been friends for a couple of years but it feels like it’s been longer. He’s been dependable, when she allows him to be. Sometimes she is shut off, a city with walls reaching to the heavens that only she knows. He doesn’t complain though, he simply waits for her to come around.
“I hope so. I’ve sent out so many applications and it’s the waiting that kills me. That time in space where I have no idea what’s going on and I’m checking my emails five times an hour, it’s ridiculous. Thank you though. I feel a little better now. I haven’t really told anyone that. What about you, what are you afraid of?”
She sends it and it is not a lie. She does feel a little better. The music continues to play and she hums along.
He says a silent prayer of thanks as he reads her reply, then curses as he finishes her final sentence. He is afraid of being alone because who wants damaged goods? He’s been through a few relationships that have done nothing but compound his insecurities to the point where he can panic over something as simple as sending a text. He’s invested too much of himself in the wrong people and he’s not sure he’ll ever get it all back.
He adjusts himself on the bed so his leg doesn’t fall asleep, wondering how to explain this. Wondering how he can explain that seeing his parents’ marriage disintegrate at the age of 14 makes him wonder if he’s destined to walk the same path. He can vividly recall his mother’s tears as she and his father sat down to explain to him that they would no longer be together. “We don’t love each other anymore.” He’s afraid of scaring her away but he’s come too far to turn back.
“I’m afraid of relationships, or relationships with the wrong person. I’ve been there before and it hurt and still hurts when I think about how it’s fucked me up. I believe in love, I just wonder if I’ll ever find an accurate, lasting form of it with someone that’s going to reciprocate it rather than taking all I have to give and leaving me worse off than they found me.”
She washes her hands before leaving the bathroom. She enters her room and spots the phone on her table with a notification from him. She feels her heart flip a little bit. The kind of flip where you’re exposed to a new side of someone and you’re not sure how it makes you feel. She knows that he’s been in a couple of bad relationships, but he never really let on how much it was affecting him. Whenever she asked him how he was doing, he would shrug it off with passive answers but clearly there was more under the surface.
She is at a loss, because she believes he’s a great guy but she can’t guarantee that he’ll find love. She wants to reassure him but it’s fucking love, where’s the certainty in that? He’ll definitely find someone that he can tolerate, maybe even someone he likes but love? To her, love is one of the most elusive things on earth but Marcus is a sweeter soul. A poet. Maybe he’d find someone to bring his poetry to life.
“Love is just the biggest mystery to me. I feel like every guy that comes along is just trying to fuck or fuck with me.”
She pauses for a moment, careful to choose her next words. She just wants him to feel better without being a liar. She takes another moment to think and continues.
“I think that you’re a great guy, I really and truly do and I believe that you deserve the kind of love that Disney uses to make a billion dollars. Yeah the past has messed you up, but we all have some scars. If you ever want to talk about them, I’m here. Don’t let those experiences make you think you won’t find what you’re looking for.”
Her eyes are starting to feel just the tiniest bit heavy as she sends him her reply.
His eyes are trained outside the window, watching a man limp past wearing nothing but trousers and sandals, cigarette in hand. He starts to think of a million scenarios to explain why the man is there when his phone vibrates. He smiles at the Disney line. She’s so cute. For the first time that night, he’s certain of what he needs to do next.
“Can I send you something I wrote?”
She sees it, and without hesitation replies.
“Yes please”
He wrote it on that night when the dam was leaking. He had waited for the flood to subside, wiped his eyes, grabbed his phone and wrote. He quickly begins searching through the notes on his phone, scrolling past unfinished missives, grocery lists, contact information for people he would never speak to and more, then he finds it.
“Delicate words through which I portray my patience borne of pain linger around the edges of frayed memories from a happy day. A day in which I gazed upon your face and had the briefest sensation of peace flood my body. I saw the sun bow before your smile and adorn your flesh with its light. I felt parts of my chest that had grown cold and dusty from neglect start up again, and I coughed but assured you I was fine. I lied of course, I was far from fine. I was miles above fine, floating and soaring to words that man have not even come up with yet. The day ended, as they tend to do and I began my descent from my celestial perch back to the ground that taunted me with it’s promises of fine and alright. You floated home obliviously, and I stored the memory of that day away. On nights such as these where I begin to swallow myself whole, I look upon that frayed memory and if only for a moment, I cough, and a smile dances across my lips.”
She’s floored by the beauty he finds in simplicity. She loves his writing and the way he uses words to create pictures in his mind. She yawns as she types her response, curious as to what could have inspired such poetry.
“That was really beautiful Marcus. Every time you show me one of your pieces I wish I could do what you do. What inspired that?”
He’s on autopilot, now, his fingers and brain moving in perfect harmony with fear and common sense holding on to each other for dear life in the back of his mind.
“Do you remember a couple of months ago, after exams had ended and a bunch of us went to that park to just chill?”
She jolts up as the falling sensation of her head snaps her awake in the chair at her desk. She sees the reply and her brow furrows a bit as she tries to recall the memory through her now foggy mind while she moves over to her bed. She places it and quickly replies.
“Yeah I remember. What about it?”
He runs his fingers through his hair again and takes a deep breath before composing his reply.
“That was the day I saw you and things made sense for a while. A few hours at most, but it was like finding the missing piece of a puzzle that I didn’t even know I was doing. Things just made sense. You’ve always looked beautiful, and you’ve always been beautiful on the inside but idk, it was like I was a deaf man who had just heard a symphony for the very first time. I have spent countless nights, reflecting on that day, and trying to figure out the best way to say that I’m in love with you and out of all the scenarios I’ve come up with, this reality is easily the worst one but if I don’t say it now, I might never and that will cripple me worse than any fear could.”
He doesn’t delete it. He reads it, and reads it again, then closes his eyes and hits send. He sits back at the edge of his bed, with his shoulders hunched over. He does not carry the weight of the world, just the weight of uncertainty and he wonders to himself what the difference is.
Her phone vibrates, and the screen lights up, a lonely beacon in a dark room. Her deep breathing is not interrupted by the arrival of his message. Her chest rises and falls as she sleeps dreamlessly, unaware of what lies just a few inches from her face.
He’s lying down, waiting for sleep to carry him away, tired of asking himself if he’s made a mistake. He’s pretty sure it was a huge fucking mistake. He thinks about the man walking down the road shirtless, wondering if there’s some grand metaphor or sign that the universe was trying to send him. He falls asleep before he can figure it out.
FIN.
