I'm always trying to go to sleep early when Sienna works nights. I know Peja will be up first thing tomorrow, just after Sienna gets home, and I'm going to drag my sorry old body out of bed and take her downstairs for breakfast and a morning of fairly uninspired play -- "How about we pretend that I'm the cashier at the grocery store -- you bring me stuff and I'll tell you what it costs. . ." Four hours later. . .
But I can't do it. The house is just too quiet. I feel like I'm 18 again, or living in the farm house in Guelph at 22. . . You can think it's lame or whatever, but Sienna and I have spent every night together since we met, except for her first 6 or whatever night shifts this month.
I just instantly revert back to my old nocturnal self, when I wouldn't really think about going to sleep until the panic of "Uh, I'm only going to get 2 hours sleep before my first class" would set in. And, really, it wasn't a big deal because I would just come home from class and nap the afternoon away. Ever crank music and take a nap? There's this great period of time before you're actually asleep when your conscious thoughts slow down and the music is all that you are noticing in the world. It's pretty awesome, I think. . .
Alright, there's a 3 1/2 year old human upstairs that really should remind me that I'm not my old self anymore. But, to be honest, Peja is more like a third arm to me -- like when you look at old pictures and think, "Oh, right, I used to wear glasses" -- when something is all-the-time, you start to imagine that it was always the case. Sometimes I dream that I'm back in college, or even high school, and generally Peja is right there with me (and I'm not wearing my glasses, for the record). Really, glasses?
So, what would be the options in the olden days. . . Well, I'd probably spent some time in the studio, convinced that falsetto singing was the key to a pop song. . . Which might be the case for someone else's falsetto, but certainly not for mine. I'm guessing that's not the best move (See above sleeping new human), so the other thing I'd do all night is write.
Sometimes things like this: (WARNING: FICTIONAL CONTENT TO FOLLOW)
At midnight, after three hours of heavy snow, the road was a salty slushy mess. The shoulder was knee-deep powder over a foot of crusted and untrustworthy hard pack. The street lights were a few hundred yards apart, leaving dark shadows between --confusing the snow, ice and slush, and often sending him sprawling into the muck. The young man would walk on the road, his already soaked runners getting wetter and colder with every step, until a passing car forced him off. He would clamber up onto the snowdrift, hoping not to break through the crusty hard packed, where he had gotten stuck several times already, losing and retrieving his shoes with bare hands numb and frostbitten. His nose was bleeding hot down into his mouth, where he was sure that he was missing at least one tooth. His left eye was cut and almost swollen shut. His ribs ached with every breath, tender where their fists and boots had assaulted, and he was half-convinced that he was dying from internal injuries. Fifty meters from his goal – a bus stop under the next light – a meat truck swung around the corner and sent him back up onto the bank. Cursing, he broke through the crust and again his shoe became lodged below the ice, his socked foot surfacing alone through the snow. He reached down with his hand, beyond cold, beyond caring. He pushed it through the snow and tried to grasp the lost sneaker; he failed. The nerves weren’t responding; a futile effort with his other hand left him with little choice. The bus would be warm. It would take him to help. He continued with one shoe, his foot too numb to care or notice.
He reached the bus stop, no more than a bench and a six inch wide sign on a metal post, used his sleeve to clear a space to sit, and collapsed. He had only walked a mile or so from where they had dumped him, but it had taken him the better part of an hour. It was getting colder, now that the clouds had moved off, and a full moon gave light that would have lessened his struggle moments before.
He had fueled his journey with anger and hatred, every step along the road was in defiance of the attackers who had left him for dead. But now he was spent. He pulled his arms up the sleeves of his thin pullover and hugged his body. He folded his sock foot up under himself – he couldn’t feel it at all.
He dared a smile when he heard the last bus of the night coming down the road, it’s diesel engine revving loud. The young man mustered his strength, stood, and took three effort filled steps to stand beside the bus stop sign. He waved a token gesture, then as the bus failed to slow, a larger wave, then both hands, then a shout, then a scream. The bus stormed past and down the road.
“Come on!
Hey!
Please!
Come on!,” He yelled after it, falling to the ground defeated. Tears mixed with the blood on his face.
He cursed god. He cursed his attackers. But most of all he cursed the bus. Flying down the road, laughing at him. It didn’t stop as a joke. It didn’t stop because the driver was lazy, near the end of his shift. It didn’t stop because his attackers had bribed the driver. It didn’t stop because the driver was old and fucking blind. It didn’t stop because they thought he was gay. It didn’t stop because he dropped out of high school. It didn’t stop for everything and everyone and the whole world was shit and this bus was paying him back for something he never even did. So he pushed the bus with his eyes, willing it to crash and burn – praying for it to miss the corner and slide over the bank. And then it did.
The now frozen slush had refused the bus tires any firm purchase on the road, and they continued straight across the other lane and broke on the high curb with great force. A horrible squeal of metal sounded the bus’s fight to continue on, and finally the suspension gave, and the wheels jammed up and over the side of the road. The fence was nothing. It crumbled like tin foil, and the bus got halfway over the bank before something solid under the bus hit the curb and brought it to a halt.
As the torn-up bus settled down into the snow, smashed and torn, window frames bent and empty, the glass falling shattered into the snow, a new sound reached the young man’s ears. A sustained piercing scream – a woman in excruciating pain, pleaded the night for help. The man lifted his face out of the snow, pushed himself up with his elbows. The scream got louder, broke through the blood in his ears, pushed past his indifference, and awoke a basic sympathy that the world had refused him.
Back down the middle of the road, recklessly hopping and sliding, falling and willing himself back up. If his eyes had pushed the bus off the road, then they sure as hell were going to get him to the wreck. He stared at his feet, one shoe and one sock, and ordered them forward across the ice.
“Can you reach my phone?”
Between screams, between breaths.
“Hello! Help me, goddamn it! I’m having a goddamned baby!”
Looking the part, she assumed he had been in the wreck too.
It was warm inside the bus. It wouldn’t be for long, with the windows smashed out, but for now it was warm. It was a relief for his face, and torture for his feet and hands. He had entered through the front doors, their frame bent and jammed, but yielding to his shoulder’s blow. The driver was dead. No question. A good portion of the shattered fence had flown up and crashed through the left side of the flat front window at chest level. The flesh and transit uniform bare little resemblance to the life that was gone. It wasn’t a view to linger on.
The baby had been born sometime between him leaving the bus stop and his arrival at the site of the wreck. Two screams rose in place of one.
Two broken legs and a dislocated shoulder for the mother, and a stranger’s coat for the baby picked up by frost-bitten hands. He willed his hands to pick up the baby, half blue but fighting, and he wrapped it as best he could. It was a boy, with a head full of hair and tightly closed eyes and clenched fists.
“My phone, it fell and slid to the back of the bus.”
Her voice lowered the moment she was handed the baby. He collapsed in front of the phone, prying it open with one hand, dialing the three numbers with his nose, pressing SEND with his thumb, and succumbing to the internal injuries from the beating earlier that night.
END OF FICTIONAL CONTENT
Good night.
Jay.
