Whoosh

Spasms of horror and unstoppable convulsions of disgust--my body that of an epileptic lying in the devil's embrace. I couldn't explain it, not to myself, not to anyone, and that is the frustration of this pain and confusion: it is inexplicable, irrational. It is an obsessive torment that grows with every feeding, every night I lie awake, counting away the minutes, the seconds, of a life I no longer desire to live.

I clutched in the darkness for my bike lights--they were where I had left them, in the top drawer--listening to CW's even, raspy breath, a cold gripping his tired lungs and throat and nose. I tried not to awaken him as I slid our door shut, the wood catching and groaning, and with it, we wake each other in the early hours of the morning, when one or the other steals softly into or out of bed. I do not know if he awoke.

I rode out into the city night, a dark of perpetual light, orange-yellow streetlight illumination on the potholed pavement, and I rode down College Ave., knowing the Rockridge Safeway would be open at two in the morning. There was one pack of Benson & Hedges left, hidden beside boxes of American Spirit, an inappropriate categorization and impossible to find, non-menthols, but I'd promised to wean myself off of menthols anyway, so I savored my unusual morsel of luck.

"Could I get the last pack of Benson & Hedges?"

"Expensive," the clerk grunted as he swiped it across the scanner, almost as an after-thought; I could feel no ill-will nor malice.

"I indulge, now and then," was all I could think of to say, "It's bad, I know," ashamed.

I biked back home in the middle of the road, hands outstretched, feeling the weight of death lift in the cold nighttime air, in the nightly Pacific Ocean exhalation, cool breath on feverish sun-burnt land, on feverish sun-burnt minds. Alone, I stood on the roof, watching the embers pulse in my hand as I breathed. I could not sleep. I could not die. I could not bear the pain that was living.

So I wandered and smoked and settled on the notion of accordion-playing in the Stephens Hall arcade, with its haunting acoustics and Gothic arches and antiquated hexagonal hanging lights, until the weight of the accordion and my own exhaustion broke my back and the notes began to blur and swim in sloppy animation before my eyes, and I knew I had stayed up too long and too late and could finally bury myself in fitful sleep until tomorrow.