This is Between You and I
I don’t know when my nights began blurring into mornings I couldn’t differentiate. What day is it, again? There’s a pill to put me to sleep. There’s a pill to keep me away from a needle. There’s a pill to wake me up in the morning. Why did I let her convince me to accept help; is that what this is?
I used to see in so many different colors: vibrant, various, bright. But now, the colors have dimmed and I see in bland shades of a gray that I didn’t want in the first place. Instead of marveling at the way she’s breathing while she sleeps and the way she looks at me when she first wakes up, I’m staring at the insides of my eyes and wondering where my dreams have gone.
I’m dreaming on a different channel, now, one that I don’t get service for. And they’re all in black and white. Every day is the same, black and white and bland, and unfortunately for me… that’s what the future looks like. Gone are the days that I allowed myself to be in touch with the wild side where adventures were as easy to come by as the blatant redundancy of life. I thought I traded volatile behavior for safety. For support. For comfort. For love.
I hadn’t seen my brother in months, not until he showed up at the apartment I’d begun cohabitating with her in. I don’t know when it happened, really… probably somewhere around the time I couldn’t recognize what day it was anymore. I’d borrowed her hands for help. No, she offered them, right? Mutual hand-holding.
You know, it’s incredibly easy to disguise feelings as something else. They surface in the strangest of ways; you second guess yourself, you offer them your innermost thoughts and feelings. And then suddenly the fibers of your beings are sewn together in a way that you can’t tell one piece of material from another.
Happily connected, there was comfort in her presence. There was normalcy in her routine mingling with mine. There was acceptance of my ferocious need to fix; and I was prepared to take her heart by storm, wearing my suit of white armor. Ever the white knight I needed someone to believe I was.
My brother slithered back into my peripheral vision last night. With him he brought an air of tenacious pride, his shoulders held square as he faced me and attempted to regard me with some kind of familial … something, or other.
Far be it for me to request his personal removal from the apartment, but she wasn’t here. I was less than content to sit in the presence of his swelling arrogance; there was a part of me that was glad to see him and so I allowed his conceited frame to pose lazily on the couch opposite the armchair I’d perched in. Languid and predatory, both characteristics I recognized as I knew the way they swam over my own features – oh, how his looked just like mine.
It was I who had patented that aloof expression, devoid of tendrils of pacified emotion. As if we’d been close, as if we’d embodied the stereotypical twin image, he offered me a description of his entry to the city and how he’d bumbled along to find a residence, employment, and companionship.
The words were monotonous as they tumbled from his lips in what should have seemed like a carefully concocted speech, but my ears only heard unintelligible ramblings until the crystalline sound of one word, in particular, caused what felt like an earthquake to begin.
I hate it when the ground shakes. When something you’re so sure of, a truth you’re so reliant on, quivers and quakes. It’s almost impossible to keep your bearings. And that is exactly what I didn’t do; hearing your name on my brother’s tongue caused a shudder to wrack my existence, if and only if, it was because he and I had been here before.
How is it that your name came from his mouth? The single utterance stood out in his ramblings as an intelligible word, causing the room to sway out of focus briefly. I didn’t really want to think about how he’d come across you, or what you’d been doing when he had, or what you’d done after you’d met him, or what he had done after.
We might have shared genetics and looks, but there was little else he and I shared. And as he continued to describe his evening, his eyes intently resting on mine as if to lock them there to gauge my reaction, I was reminded of this fact. There truly was little else he and I shared.
When he spoke to you, did you recognize that too?
I don’t want to sit here and think about you. Hours after my brother had gone back to whatever snake-hole he’d come from, I’m sitting on the porch with the first cigarette I’ve had in what feels like years between my lips. The smoke doesn’t even feel good, it doesn’t feel like I’m accomplishing any kind of relief, but I keep inhaling it and watching as it contorts violently in the darkness that’s fallen long since she came home and went to bed without me. She worried about how I’d left a bottle of pills unopened with a dose clearly missed on the nightstand that stood next to my empty side of the bed, but honestly?
Even though my lungs are burning and I’m tired and I can’t sleep, I haven’t seen in color like this in too long. And I don’t want to lose that.
So instead of accepting the help I thought I wanted, thought I needed… I’m sitting out here, watching stars twinkle like they’re mocking my complacency. I didn’t even know I felt complacent until I wanted to wrap my hands around his fucking throat for mentioning you. I don’t know if it was rage. I don’t even know if it was jealousy that my mirror image had gotten to see you and I hadn’t been there. That I hadn’t gotten to see you and he had. I don’t fucking know; just the absolute vomit of thoughts had me smoking another cigarette like my life might have depended on it.
I don’t know. It just might have.
The nicotine was keeping me awake, letting me sit around festering in my own head. That was never a safe place to be, not really. There were times when it was okay to lay in a field of my own thoughts, leisurely staring up at the sky and pretending like I can make something out of life and if I think that there really is a God and whatever…
But all I can think of right now is how strange it feels to feel something other than gray. Other than a temperate temperature. I’m hot, my skin is crawling and I can’t shake the feeling that there’s a large, gaping hole in my chest but dear Lord, even that feels good.
In that moment, I swear I could smell a hint of jasmine on the warm breeze that brought me from a reverie and made me aware of the tinge of orange feathering the horizon. As the night waned I started realizing that she’d wonder why I wasn’t in bed. If I was sane and what kind of state I might show up in.
And I wanted to know if you ever wondered about my sanity. If you worried about what state you might find me in. Unsure if I actually wanted the answer, I let myself back into what felt more like a cage now than anything else and lay myself down in a bed that was more like a shackle.
Her hand is on my chest, her breathing is soft and careful, and she has no idea that I’m too hot to be laying here under the covers with her body pressed against mine. It doesn’t feel comfortable, and it doesn’t feel good and that just makes me want another cigarette, but she’s already waking up and wrinkling her nose at the smell.
I’m not sorry. When she rolls over and props herself up on me to tell me it’s acrid and disgusting, and to ask me if I took medication and if I slept okay, her eyes try to steady mine. And as I look into the familiar warmth of her gaze, I can tell that something she sees in mine scares her.
Truthfully, I don’t want to fight it, I don’t like taming the wild. I don’t want to be laying here, I don’t want to be jealous that my brother saw you and I’m desperate to know what he did and what he said to you. And what you thought, and what you wanted out of it. If you wanted to see me. If you wanted him to say anything to me, or if you wanted him to keep it from me. She runs her hand through her hair, and the scent of lingering perfume distracts me enough to realize I’m mildly revolted by the smell. I’m craving the way my shirt smelled like jasmine and cinnamon after I’d had you in every way I possibly could. She’s urging me for attention, for me to be present, for me to wrap my arms around her.
I can’t, but I find the monotonous robot inside me allows her to find her way against me and to find whatever it is she needs from me right now. For me to hold her, for me to do anything besides set off like the rocket she thinks I am. When she gets it from me, what she wants, finding her skin on my skin and her fingers tangling in my hair, I get this sinking feeling that I’m not even thinking about her.
I think I’m angry; he was never supposed to be here. He was never supposed to step in that way. I was never supposed to feel like this, I’m supposed to be dutiful and be happy that there’s a loving woman who’s vying for my attention right now as I’m thinking about how badly I want to confront him - how badly I want to confront you about the fact that I’m sure you’re not awake right now. About how you’re probably thankful your pillow doesn’t smell like cigarette smoke after I’ve lain there. About how you might be satisfied that by somehow conveying anything to my brother, you’ve gotten to me. I’m sure you know you have. I want to confront you. I want to …
I didn’t want to go there, but I seldom do what I think is best. So, tell me Serafina, after meeting him… Could you sleep easy tonight? Or were you lying awake wondering what it would be like if there wasn’t a rift valleys deep between the two of us?