Gone

Nights are hard. I listen to the deathly quiet, wishing it was loud enough to drown out the memories. I stand up and turn on the fan, even though the midsummer fog blankets the city and its cold fingers seep through cracks in the walls.

The fan is loud. A blade is broken. Click, click, click echoes in the silence. A piece of plastic teetering on the edge of the blade is the byproduct of my destructive habit of throwing a tennis ball at the ceiling when I’m feeling particularly unfocused. The constant beat gives me a thing to focus on. Besides the silence.

But I get too distracted and break things. A picture frame sits on the dresser, a crack right through my smile. I never changed the glass; it’s a much more accurate portrait than the one behind the crack.

I wonder, not for the first time, if the plastic perched so precariously on the moving fan will impale me when it finally falls off.

I check my phone. It’s only 2 a.m. The white light illuminates the scab on my wrist, and the tattoo ink congealed beneath it.

I think about that little shop, full of needles and ink and the talented artists that hold them, cigarettes hanging out the sides of their mouths as they brag about the time they tattooed the lead singer of a local punk band before he got big and moved to Seattle.

I trace the scab with my left hand, the constellation representing everything I had and lost to the universe.

It’s not a pattern anyone would recognize. If you ask an astronomer, she would tell you the artist made a mistake. He didn’t.

The constellation is mine. I drew the stars few and far between, save for two, sitting next to each other in the universe, yet separated by lightyears no one can see.

A dotted line connects it all, a web of dark matter, struggling to hold things together as the universe continues its gradual expansion, no two celestial objects ever closer than they are at this very moment.

I blink away tears.

Rolling over, I turn toward the window, watching the fog creep down the road. Someone stumbles in the street, drunkenly making his way home, perhaps as lost in his own universe as I am in mine.

I count the days. Thirteen. Thirteen days until I make my escape. Less than two weeks until I can run away, pretend nothing ever happened, and fill the expanding space in my universe with light instead of the suffocating darkness.

My chest hurts when I lay on my side too long because I forget to breathe.

I roll back over and stare at the fan and the piece of plastic illuminated by the foggy yellow lamplight.

With each click, I remember to breathe. And count each exhalation until I drift off, left hand wrapped around my right wrist.