"Midnight" Part 7

And this is how it ends.

Or rather, how it begins. 

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The room is cold. 

I grope through the dim blackness to my right for the floor lap. I bump it, feel for the switch, and allow a mellow glow to penetrate the meager apartment space. I wearily walk over to the window, pull back the curtains, and stare down into the dimly-lit, foggy world below.

My home is nothing extravagant. I live in the big city, but not in luxury. It's a humble, studio apartment which means there's a kitchen, a bedroom, and a living room all shoved into one small space. The bathroom, thankfully, owns a door.

I sleep on the couch in the middle of the room. It's a foldout couch, but I'll admit on most nights I'm too lazy to haul the bed out from its comfortable hiding place. There's a long, stubby coffee table in front of the couch and a television in front of the table, nestled against the wall. The window is to the left of the television, and the kitchen is to the right. The bathroom is opposite the kitchen.

I remove my wet coat and hang it on a hook nailed into the bathroom door. I slip my sopping wet Nikes off and place them beneath the sink in the bathroom. I lay my soggy socks beside the shoes after which I immediately crinkle my nose and turn away.

Wet, pruned, smelly feet—go figure.

I lay the rest of my damp clothes across the toilet seat and quickly take a warm shower. Afterward, I pull on a white t-shirt and jersey shorts and collapse on the couch. 

It's been a long night. 

My phone beeps. I had forgotten it when I went out.

I lazily pick it up and flip open the black face. I have one missed call from a little past midnight—a few minutes after I had left.

It was her.

I freeze.

It's difficult to describe moments like this. Your limbs become rigid, but everything else begins to race. Your heart begins to pound away behind the cage inside your chest. Your mind is now fully alert and sprinting past approximately fifty-three and a half assumptions of why this person has called—expecting the worst, no doubt. You begin to sweat and slowly find the courage to move.

I clear the screen and my phone beeps once again—one new voicemail. My nerves shift into overdrive. I haven't heard from her in over a month. 

I glance wide-eyed out the window as pieces of our last conversation begin to surface. In short, things were complicated, feelings were awkward, but she didn't want to shut the door on our friendship.

So, she shut the window.

It's a different sort of pain standing outside the window of a person's life. You shove your face against the glass and peer inside, hoping to catch a glimpse of this person you were once so close to. 

And finally you do.

You see her laughing as she enters the room with other friends. They sit down and begin to talk with each other about their day and how things are going. They share stories, and they smile. They hug, and they laugh. They cry, but most of all, they love each other. You watch, disconnected and untouched, as she begins to grow and change in life, knowing that you were there, once. Perhaps you'll be blessed with a glance from her, but it’s nothing more than that. She finally leaves the room, and you're left outside standing with your face pressed against the glass like a peeping tom, wondering how you fell from grace.

It's a sickening, confusing, humiliating feeling. 

I glance at my phone as it begins to automatically dial my voicemail. I slowly press 

it against my ear. A female computer voice sprightly informs me that I have one, unheard voice message.

A few seconds of eternity later, I hear her.

I know it's late, but we need to talk. Call me back when you get this.

I listen to it about three times over, just to be sure. In the middle of the fourth repetition, I purposefully shut my phone and begin to turn it over in my hands. I pause and glance at the numbers on the clock hanging above the television.

6:32 a.m. She's asleep. Even if she's not, now is not the time. I'll call her back later today.

After about five minutes I set my phone on the table. I slowly push myself up from the couch and switch off the floor lamp behind me. A pale darkness invades the room once again as I lay down on the couch, pulling the covers up to my shoulders.

I stare at the ceiling. My body is tired and aching, but my mind and heart are wide awake. I'm nervous. I'm hopeful. Questions race. I don't think I'll ever fall asleep.

Midnight lasts so long on these nights when you can't forget.

I shift onto my left side and stare out the window. The atmosphere outside is turning gray. I hear cars honking in the distance. The world is waking up.

And somewhere behind it all, the sun is beginning to shine.

"Midnight" Part 6

These stairs and I tend to embrace a love and hate relationship. 

First floor. The steps are cold and indifferent. This building is fairly new, and the steel blocks show no mercy.

What I love about stairs: your steps are visually and dimensionally defined.

What I hate about stairs: with each step, you must defy gravity. Not that defying gravity in and of itself is a bad thing, per se, but defying gravity approximately 150 times in succession tends to wear out a person’s legs. 

And my legs are ready to give up the ghost.

Second floor. I grunt as I trip, catch the rail, and then haul myself up, around, and continue upward.

I saw a musician perform Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” once on a talk show. I enjoyed it not because I thought the guy was a great musician or that I like the song, but because he messed up quite a few times while performing it. Come to think of it, he messed up nearly the entire song, but it was still fun to watch.

It paints a stunningly accurate picture of our lives—so many of us are trying to climb this stairway to heaven, and we screw up entirely. 

Third floor. I pause. I’ve only climbed three flights and my knees are ready to give out. 

Some of us, however, don’t merely stumble over a step or two, but it feels like we tumble down and backward, end over end, until finally crashing into a broken heap at the bottom of these unforgiving steps. It was never intentional for most people, but it happened anyway. And the saddest part is that, of the few who actually pick themselves up, they take one look skyward, they see the distance, and they decide that it’s not worth the climb.

They’d be more comfortable at the bottom where there’s no longer a chance of falling down. 

But if they knew what was waiting at the top of the stairs, would they remain on the bottom floor?

Fourth floor. I wince. My right leg begins to cramp. I glance out the window to my right. The fog is still thickening. The streetlights below carry halos above their tired heads.

But the average person isn’t blessed with knowing the end of his story. For many, it seems like they fizzle out and fade into a tired, old memory—worn out and void of life. For others, they exit the stage in the midst of the play, just when things are getting good. A few, however, live wonderful lives, and they see their end coming. Perhaps there are some changes they would make, but for the most part, life is good.

Fifth floor. I’m out of breath now, two floors left. I pause and glance over the railing toward the bottom. From here, five stories is a long drop.

Why do people fall in love? Think about it. If love is supposed to be such a good thing, why isn’t it something more along the lines of ‘I’ve flown into love!’ or ‘I’ve climbed into love!’?  A verb that sounds uplifting. Isn’t falling, like falling down the stairs, usually a bad thing? 

Take, for instance, the devil. He rebels against God, gets thrown out of heaven, and falls to earth. Hell is considered to be in a rather southerly direction. Falling on your face was never a good thing. 

And falling five stories wouldn’t feel too good, either.

But, then again, who ever intends to fall in the first place? Who, unless they’re suicidal or crazy, determines to fall down five flights of stairs and land on their face?

I guess that’s why it’s called falling in love—it’s almost always never intentional. Your heart trips head over feet for someone and there’s nothing your head can do to stop it. 

But falling in love seems to only hurt when you fall in love alone.

Sixth floor. I purse my lips and begin the final push.

Climbing is a different story altogether. Ascending up to or over something is usually a good thing. 

Take, for instance, Jesus Christ. He rose from the dead after dying to save the world. People overcome terrible situations. You raise money, you rise to the occasion, or you lift a burden. All of this upward vocabulary sounds so positive. 

But it also sounds like a lot of work. It sounds intentional.

After all, when you fall, you lift yourself up. But it’s nice when you don't have to lift yourself up alone.

Seventh floor. I sigh in relief. I don’t care to look back. I’ve seen the view so many times before. I habitually turn right, walk three doors down, and stop in front of the door on the left. I dig through the change in my right pocket and feel for the key. I put it in the lock and turn it halfway to the right.

It's almost over. I sigh as I push the door open and step into the darkened space.

"Midnight" Part 5

I love it when the heavens meet the earth.

26th street, I yawn. Clouds are beginning to gather around my feet, carefully searching out the shadowy corners of the city. Lights stretch out and sounds dampen as the morning dwindles on. I enjoy fog as much as rain, almost as much as newly fallen snow, but not quite as much as pizza on a Saturday night with a few friends and a movie.

Yes, one could say that as far as material things go, pizza is my first love.

But my memory is like this fog. 

Imagine a lamp—the old-fashion, kerosene lamp used before the invention of the light bulb—being carried through a fog at night. It's not blinding, but pleasantly dim, swaying slowly this way and that, suspended and relaxed as it wanders through the milky atmosphere. It doesn't ignite the world around it, but the world around it can see it coming. 

Like a fog, I have trouble remembering things clearly. I know—it's a funny thing to hear from a young man of only twenty-three. In fact, when you think about it, it's ridiculous. For me, though, it seems true enough—unless my measurement of how clearly memories should surface is slightly lacking.

Memories, I believe, require more than just a picture in your head. Perhaps that's why I find them difficult to conjure correctly. I think memories should incorporate not only images and the senses but also emotion.

And there's the difficult part—replaying emotion.

25th street. A few cars rumble past, passing through street puddles like an early morning stretch. 

Of course a person can easily attach a scrolling marquee to an image in their head, flashing, 'This is where I felt betrayed,' and then attempt to recreate the feeling of betrayal. But what weight is carried when an emotion is just a title in your head? Where is the connection to the heart?

A cat mournfully sings from a passing alleyway. I glance left as two green eyes follow me from behind someone else's trash.

She, however, isn't foggy at all. I remember everything—every image, every sound, every sense, and I feel every emotion from the night she did not say goodbye.

24th street. One more block. 

Some might mistake my brokenness for romance—like a Hollywood love story. It's not so shallow. There wasn't a flirtatious first date and a first kiss after our serendipitous meeting, nor was there a second date followed by a heated night of passionate, guilt-free sex where the stars fell in line and the heavens declared that this is a good idea, so now it's time to move in with each other before we finally decide to marry and seal the deal with a ceremonial kiss. But then, for some unexplainable, unjustifiable reason, she decides that it's better that we 'just be friends' and breaks my heart into a million pieces, leaving me to cope with the pain, alone, while she flaunters off with someone new.

No, this is more gut-wrenching and complex. 

It's about a broken friendship.

23rd street. Flustered and exhausted, I cross the street. The effort of walking fifty city blocks is nothing compared to struggling through a few vivid memories.

My apartment building is at the end of the street. The fog is beginning to thicken. Street lights trail into the night as the plunk, plunk, plunk from a draining gutter echoes somewhere in the distance. My body is tired, but my mind is racing. 

Replaying heartbreak is a dangerous game. It's like shouting at an angry man or diving through loose snow in the mountains. Something's going to collapse. Memories begin to flood over like a river after rain. Assumptions well up from deep within confused situations and without warning an avalanche of misconceptions erupts into devastating, heart-wrenching, emotional pain.  

An old man, bent and tired, shuffles past on my left. I don't say anything. He mumbles reminders to himself.

Don't forget the cat food. Poor kitty looks so hungry.

Someone intelligent and wiser than me once said that assumptions are the termites of relationships.

This collapsing framework is full of them.

Droplets begin to form and trail down the silver surfaces of dimming street-lamps.

I love fog, but not in relationships, and especially not in memories. Even in painful situations, I want to remember how I felt. I don't want to become numb. It makes me think that my heart is growing cold, or even worse, turning to stone.

A heart of ice is infinitely easier to melt than a heart of stone. 

And I fear the day when I don't feel it anymore. I fear the day when her image is as numb and indifferent as my hands on this wet and chilly night.

I stop at 806, 23rd street and gaze upward. I can hardly see my seventh story window through the fog. I slowly climb the steps toward the entrance and squeeze past the glass door.

No mail. I don't know why I check. It's passing 5 a.m.. Habit, I guess. The elevator is out of order. I forgot about that. I glance toward the foot of the stairs…

…the seven stories of stairs.

Perfect.

It's going to be a long climb up