"I love Sunday nights, especially ones like this. I don't sleep too much, you see, so I get to experience one of the few beautiful parts of living in a city: the isolating and tranquil stillness of Sunday nights. I'm out here on my balcony that overlooks the usually busy street, the strip mall that, like all the Midwestern strip malls, is empty except for a loan store and Chinese restaurant (that has fantastic curry chicken and, at this point, knows me by name and reserves a spot by the window for me every Monday and Thursday, because anyone who gives a monologue like this is going to be the kind of person who eats his fair share of Chinese takeout), and I feel a calmness that I only get on nights like this. There is the cool and sticky humidity of midsummer, the heavy scent of what I hope is my last cigarette of the night, and the eerie silence of heat lightning hanging overhead. And I'm happy."
Inuyasha watched as the smoke from his cigarette wisped into the night. He thought about a lot of things, then, but wouldn't quite admit that he was thinking about her or the past. Everything felt so self-indulgent about waxing poetic about insomnia and sleepy Wisconsin towns, like any of it held significance to anyone but himself, there, alone, at that specific time. A good indulgence, though, he thought. The best kind of personal exploration that only comes after enough cheep beers in a single studio apartment. Not wholly single. At least, not exactly. The thought of standing alone on his balcony enjoying some kind of reverie was strange to him, considering that all his current feelings—peace, contentment, happiness—were a result solely of him imagining himself in that very spot; that is, he began to wonder if he was really taking pleasure in some Decadent communion with nature and urban life or was instead trying to write himself a decent story that could explain just why he was happily enamored with Kagome but was still stopping to wonder in a kind of sloppy passive voice: what else could there be?
"It's strange, really, how thunderstorms look in the morning. How the light wants to break but can only make everything look like a bruise, but not in a bad way. It's calming. This is my time, no one else's. Kagome is sleeping in our room with the blankets kicked off in only those weird small shorts that girls like to now wear that imply running but only really mean, 'It's time to relax and be comfortable.' There is a slight sheen of sweat on her chest and stomach, and some of her hair is sticking to her neck and collarbones in dense strands. Even though I can hear her softly snore through the open window—or maybe, probably more likely, because I can—I am happy. I know she isn't wearing underwear, and I can see her breasts rise and fall with each, well, snort or growl or whatever word I should use to describe how a girl snoring is cute without using too many adverbs, and I know I made her generally content and happy when she came home from work to a clean apartment and dinner already made and a cold gin and tonic poured right when I heard her car pull into the gravel driveway and with the good sex we had in the shower. I'm thinking, right now, how lucky I am to have a woman who loves and trusts me as much as she, enough to shit with the door ajar and sleep mostly naked without any blankets and ask to have sex with the lights on 'because [she] want[s] to see [me],' one who will sit with me when I become too sad or incorrigible and just listen to the sound of our heartbeats and never bring it up again, ever. I was heartbroken once, before this and her. During the first year of our relationship, I used to think of this shitty metaphor, something about my heart being some kind of jewel that had been shattered. It was like she guided me, y'know? Helped me find all the pieces and put everything back together again. And but the really corny bit of the whole metaphor was that once everything was complete and finally in my hands, I realized it wasn't important. Not my heart-as-a-jewel thing (which is where the whole metaphor falls apart, really), but the feeling that I needed her to repair me or somehow make me whole again. I did all the legwork here: I fell in love with her and became a better person because I want(ed) to be the kind of man she deserves."
Inuyasha stopped himself there and began to think too much. He wondered: am I saying that I truly love her, or am I using her as some kind of figure for my own masculine self-aggrandizing? Sometimes, he worried that he treated Kagome too much like a character and not like the actual flesh-and-blood woman she is. As he stubbed out his cigarette and walked inside to brush his teeth, Inuyasha was disappointed in himself for describing Kagome and his affection toward her in those terms. He worried about the implications of thinking about himself as a good lover and partner; he thought, If I am describing myself in those terms to myself, characterizing myself in that way, then is her happiness really all that good? If I do everything I do for her with the conception of myself as a person doing those nice things for her always in the back of my mind, is anything I'm doing really worth it? For her? Sometime quickly after that, Inuyasha stopped himself from acting like a jackass. He knew that being self-reflexive about his thoughts didn't excuse him from having them, and that knowing that fact still wouldn't help him out of the woe-is-me-head-up-my-own-ass cycle that he was currently in. He watched Kagome sleep, took off his pants, and crawled between the cool sheets, praying that he could fall asleep before she woke up.