Prologue: The First Night

The crying has kept me up all night.

Usually it wore me down, until all I could do was sleep, but lately I have not been able to flush it out of my system. Truth be told, I didn’t know what I was trying to get rid of, and maybe it was that that kept me awake. That gnawing hole in my chest that keeps getting bigger and bigger. The hole that implies that something is missing, something has been taken away, but the hole has been there for as long as I can remember. I used to think it was a beautiful sort of pain, and I’d write songs and poems and short stories describing it as such, but it consumed me and the beauty faded. Then I tried to fill it by moving from one place to another, trading rural Midwestern villages and community colleges for universities in suburbs on the East Coast, and back to the Midwest for yet another school and more lessons to hear but never absorb. It worked, for a while, never staying in one area long enough for those old aches and echoes to catch up to me, but a lack of money and a desire to create some sort of stable future held me in place. I thought I was simply rooted, but I was chained and the all-devouring hole returned.

I roll over and check my phone for new notifications, new distractions, but none appear. My cat softly mews in protest at the movement, and I tell myself that if he moves in the next five minutes, I’ll get up, grab my trimmer, and shave my head. I begin to think of reasons for what would be a quite awful haircut to tell people at work the next morning, but nothing creative comes to mind. My cat has yet to move off my legs anyway, so maybe it’s all for the best.

Thinking about the hole has always reminded me of that quote about how if you stare into the darkness long enough, it stares back into you. Or something. The hole was like that. The longer I tried to analyze it, break it down and find a way to fill it, the larger it grew until suddenly there was nothing left of me, just the hole. I try to not make tonight one of those nights, but it is like trying to not think of a pink elephant.

There we go, pink elephants. I focus on that thought and reproduce a hundred kinds of pink elephants in my head. Some hot pink, some pastel, some tiny, some humongous. Eventually, it turns into a vaguely Dumbo-like dream, and I'm free.