The Silence of Nine Years
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Author's Note: I know I haven't written anything since February, and for that a thousand apologies. This was a quick drabble, written in two hours to Tori Amos, but it got the brain working again, and as such I like it. I really do plan to write the next chapter to HLS next, now that my muse has returned.
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"I'm trying not to move, it's just your ghost passing through. There's a light in your platoon, and I've never seen a light move like yours can do to me." –Tori Amos, "Putting the Damage On"
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Four a.m., Tuesday night, August twenty-second, no, August twenty-third now on a Wednesday morning in a hotel room in Chicago, staring at the ceiling sleepless with dependant clauses and run-on sentences filling my skull to the brim.
Four empty Styrofoam cups from Starbucks on the night-stand are a fitting testament to my insomnia.
Those Starbucks cups, they're all that's really in the room now. Them and me, impossibly tired and irritatingly awake, staring around the room looking for something familiar. Thin blue curtains, barely lit by the city lights, and they remind me of romantic movies when the lovers are entwined together, with one lying awake, a soft smile on their face. Except, there's only one person here, and he's not smiling.
The room just feels so damned empty. As if when my personal mountain left, the air in the room wasn't enough to replace him.
It's alright. I'll get used to this with time. I'll learn to hold my own hair out of my eyes, I'll train myself to actually get out of bed and throw my tissues into the wastebasket, or maybe I'll just drag the little bin here. It's not as if I've ever really been dependant on him anyway.
Nine years have softened me too much. I've grown much too accustomed to having someone care about me. Living without it isn't so much a wound as a phantom pain.
Ironically, the only person keeping an eye on me is the person I want to talk to least. Sean's been calling, checking up on me, are you taking your medication, how do you feel, tell your doctor if there's anything out of the ordinary. Call Theresa, he tells me, and I half expect to look beyond those blue curtains and see a pig flying by, because I actually agree.
My cellular's out of batteries, though, and I haven't made the effort to charge it again. I wonder if this is some kind of masochism, sick and alone in Chicago but not reaching for anyone's sympathies.
I wonder if that air will take nine years to fill up that empty space, of if He will be merciful and have it take a little less.
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"What do you think?" TJ says, and she turns so I can get a look at her hair from the side, the front, the back. She's had it all done in dreadlocks. "Too Rastafarian?"
"No, I like it. It looks really neat." I tell her. I really don't care, but it's nice to hear her talking, to see that big goofy grin on her face. She's a good kid. I like her.
She'd probably stab me in the back if push came to shove, though. That's something I've learned in the past few months – you can't trust people, they just want to use you. It doesn't even matter for what, really. Some people just want me to punch through walls and throw trains for them; other people just wanted me to talk to. It's still using someone, no matter how innocent you say that is.
I think that's what she's doing. She's using me to make her feel like someone cares. Isn't that just what they all do. Just took me forty-nine years to realize it.
I think that's the one thing I can really thank Tom for. He showed me that. I hate him for it.
So why do I sometimes wonder what he's doing now?
I guess that's what nine years means. You don't know someone that well, you don't listen to them talk and talk to them back for that many years without wondering where they are every once in a while.
It wasn't really nine years. There was at least a year when we only talked once a month or so, over the phone because we were on different sides of the country or something. A few months spinning around in space. And then there was that eight months when he was in the hospital, another four when he was in jail, and for all of those I don't think I ever stopped wondering where he was, what was happening. It made me crazy when those stupid assholes at the hospital wouldn't tell me anything, wouldn't let me in to see him, but when I knocked over their laboratories and broke through their walls I couldn't even smile.
At least when he was in jail we could send each other letters. I knew I had to come get him as soon as he started spelling some words wrong and his handwriting got looser. That's how well I knew him.
Nine goddamn years.
Funny how you think you know someone better than you know yourself, and you're wrong the entire time. That's just how people are, I guess. You can't trust any of them about anything.
Maybe I'll just have to pretend that I didn't talk and didn't listen for nine years.