Nocturne

The darkness is swarming stars. 

The charger's light is barely there, a sandy strip islanding in a blackened sea but the ceiling fan and ink blotted lights emerge through the waves, their bodies rippling with the tide. I know some would call that swarm ‘dust’, but

if only you could see the galaxies now. 

Sometimes the way I see civilizations where others see themselves takes its toll. The dull throbbing of my head, begging to let sleep out makes them pulse and harmonise - aether against my breath. The room is cold from the AC on full and I think back to the post that said lonely people take hot showers for longer just to feel someone on their skin.

The shivering is a part of it. 

The doorways are sunken just enough to let other worlds peek through and to be stared at in return. Entire mindscapes of spells and death are climbing this tower of burning chairs and dreams to conquer and say, “I've done it for the night. I've put him to sleep.” 

I can't tell you that the first time a strange man slept in my arms, I slept for three hours. The wakeful 24 from before of cake batter didn't matter. I radiated vanilla as the sheets took on my form, looking at him while he slept.

I wondered, “Would I be less if I settled?” 

He was beautiful, every man was beautiful because they slept and didn't say a word. They could be clasping hands and giving good night kisses as long as their lips never opened except to let mine in. 

I can't tell you that the mind that reads this as I write this is not my own. It is that girls’ who I saw on YouTube the other day defending her skin and this one from a man baring his mind. 

I can't tell you what it feels like to hear your thoughts and not even have the right to call them your own because the voice! The voices in my head need no tables because multiplication is in their neurons and subroutines. Entire crowds of alterations and substitutions in place of me. 

This 

is what it feels like to type on your phone at two in the morning when you have work at ten, and you see nebulas and not floating skin. It seems these universes are all mine, and no one understands why I keep on building and building. 

The girl's voice is hoarse from all the screaming she has done for me. 

Whoever said wooden doors and cupboards were a good idea clearly wasn't sleep deprived. These embedded resurrections are darkened just enough to see your dreams phase through the walls and greet you as old friends with their strong handshakes. I was never much for daylight but ever since a lunatic in a loincloth scaled 18 feet of brick and made it into the driveway, knives have been best buddies with boxes of tissue paper – 

you never know which sneeze isn't yours.

Echoing hallways and empty rooms are just lies waiting to come barrelling out. Trips to the fridge for ice cream never involved checking behind every door and shadow. 

This 

is what it feels like to write a prayer at 2:30 in the morning. Just add menacing fog to the light creeping under the doorway. The flycatcher was never meant to be this ghostly. 

The AC’s emphysema is stabbed with the sounds of the early morning birds. I’ve never known their names, just that come 3 AM they would begin their opera and offset the grasshopper symphonies. 

My mouth has never been filled with all the seeds I've been forced to eat but I know what that tastes like. Bitter and rotten, my toothpaste finishes and I am only done with my tongue. Dry and flaking, water has never met a thirstier desert. 

The dull ache has moved to the front now, Feeling will do that to you. The light of my screen will always be too dark or too bright to write in a sleeping room, but my mind will speak. Not whisper or scream, Thoughts know I will pick up the phone and open the notes app anyway. 

I am too afraid to ignore them anyway. 

Terrified of losing out on that one in a million that frees me of a mediocrity I am destined to become, adrenaline powers these thumbs anyway. There is this deep rumbling in the depths of my being, and the throbbing now quaking my skull. The bitterness crashes over these teeth and tongues. 

The night is powdered sugar. 

The thunderstorm just snuck a peek through the shadowing drapes on the windows. I stepped outside and let the rain soak me through as the t-shirt became a second skin and refused to lift with my arms. I kept thinking about how I would tell mom and dad about this in the morning: 

it was a religious experience 

it was a religious experience 

it was a religious experience 

Rehearsals for a curtain call that never came. Voice knows there are enough things I could never say to them, I am too much 'me' and not enough 'brave'. 

Such a dangerous thing. 

When the city searchlights blacked out and lightning flashed the sky violet, I relished in the gales of it all. Peace, sniffing snouts, and headbutting fur came my way and played ‘Keep-Away’ with every drop that flowed from my fingers. 

I was Petrichor, and the shivers that made rivers of my limbs were ripples of surging tides of warmth. 

This 

is what magic feels like. Stand close and close your eyes, feel the storm melt away with the trucks on the highway: peeping Toms for this moment and everything that comes after. The throbbing has settled with the forgotten playlists from another time, and my puppers nudge my hand to feel the rain that comes with them. 

I worry about lunatics scaling the walls another time, there will always be tomorrow. 

The small hours are anything but with their blank canvases and mausoleum homes. Life is in limbo and the moments are the open holes of a pancake that the syrup slips through, just as slow and dreamlike, like going to bed and not knowing how long you've been staring at the ceiling. 

The dead no longer hold me in the day, and we are free in the night.