I lie in bed.
Every night I lie in bed. One hour, two hours, more.
I am watching TV and I am nodding off and I think, go to bed, asshole, so I do. I lie there five minutes and know what's happening, that I am about to be laying there many hours.
Other nights I sleep immediately only to wake up in some dark hour and then hours.
Sometimes I get up and read. Sometimes if I'm weirdly hyper I'll get up and come down to the basement where the computer is and do that for a few hours, wander aimlessly though a cyber world just to kill the night.
Most times I just lie there, in bed, thinking about shit no one can do anything about, and I do this over and over. For hours.
Because I sleep in a bed-built-for-one, a twin bed, the bed that saved me from ever having to sleep with any one, I've devised a series of neighborhoods to keep me engaged over the hours, because no one can lie that still for that long in that limited a space night after night without seeking ways to make it an adventure.
So now my twin bed has about half a dozen neighborhoods. I always start on my left side. I second roll to my right side. I third lie on my back, but in the middle. Then I shift to an angle, almost always feet left, head right. A lesser neighborhood is feet right, head left, and this is good, this means when I get really bored I have an unfamiliar neighborhood to explore. The remaining neighborhoods are variations of legs and angles while on my back.
While in any neighborhood, there is also the subject matter of thought. Some thoughts prefer some neighborhoods, and some neighborhoods affect some thoughts.
Through all this I listen to the night.
I paint in my apartment and use paint thinners and my windows are always open. Sound becomes time.
The east-west buses come 45 minutes after the hour. The north-south buses begin at 5:15 a.m. The person living below me showers around 6 - 6:30 a.m. The pipes bang when anyone uses hot water and do so for the duration of the shower. The leaf blowers across the street begin just before 7 a.m. My neighbor does her breakfast dishes around 7:30. The maintenance men come to work at 8 a.m. They use the service elevator and the motor reverberates through this part of the building. That is the end of the night, and it is usually after these events that I finally fall back asleep.
Sometimes I listen to the beginning of the night. The bar across the street closes and the drunk smokers have a parking lot after-party.
After the bar and after the after-party, before the buses and leaf blowers and showers and dishes and elevators, and in-between the errant cars in-between, there lives holy moments of silence. This is my favorite time, nothingness and listening to it. I listen to it from different neighborhoods while holding different courts. I pretend I am in a tent under a sky listening to the world. I pretend I am in a tree house and the only person awake is me and I hear everything. I pretend I am in the fort I built in the middle of nowhere and the world lives inside me.
I think about my life, my father, the ghetto past I am trapped in, and how I want to go deeper into that ghetto. I want to go backwards through time, backwards through every sadness, neglect, indifference, abuse, disregard, sigh, want, regret. Also, I think about how all I want is to want none of that.
I lie on my back and pull the covers up and think about all the wrong things and listen to the world and listen to time, time, time, and sometimes in that time I get the gift of a beautiful silence.
chapter 3.