Face the Ceiling

They lay in bed, faced away from each other. A quiet image of a sad kind of serenity, the type that they’ve come to accept as their reality. The edges of the bed are warm from their body heat. The middle is cold.

She takes a sharp breath then turns to face the ceiling. She hasn’t seen the ceiling in a while. It was still white and had that weird popcorn texture that some apartments had. Staring at it, she imagined them crumbling apart slowly and falling down into her face. She imagined this and forced herself to keep her eyes open, despite the imaginary pain of having the spiky popcorn fall into her eyes. She imagined it so hard that it felt like it was going to happen any minute now. She let her mind feel a little bit heavy from imagining such a scene so hard into reality before she pulled her mind back to reality. The popcorn had been turning hazy from her lack of blinking, but now they were coming into focus again.

She takes another sharp breath and completes the 180 degree turn to face her partner. They were lying across the bed, their tense shoulders facing her.

“Babe.”

Jamie doesn’t respond. Their breathing doesn’t change. She sighs.

“Babe,” she fiddles with the edge of the blanket, “We have to talk.”

“Talk about what?”

She sighs and smooths the blanket back out,“Us, what just happened…everything?”

She watches as they exhale a deep breath then turn to face the ceiling.

Their eyes are red and watery from all the crying from before. They let the leftover tears lay on top of their eyes, creating a soggy landscape of white popcorn on the ceiling. Then they firmly rub the water out of their eyes and look up to a painfully clear ceiling of white popcorn. They knew that their room was white, but why did everything look so blue? They rubbed their eyes again, harder this time, half hoping their eyes would bleed from the rubbing and blur the blue out of the room. Static engulfed their eyes briefly, like burnt film, only to have reality sharply appear in front of them again. As painful as this reality is, they didn’t want it to change. If it changed, then that means they’ll lose the only person in the world that understands them.

“I,” their eyes close, “I don’t want to.” Because if we talk, you’ll leave.

She sighs. She understands. She just wishes that it didn’t have to be like this.

“You never want to.”

She turns to face the ceiling and they both fall asleep.