Still Lame

Out here, with the night creeping in on the edges of a dusk reality, life breathes slow. The insects scream and chirp. The frogs holler out for company of a fellow lukewarm companion. I missed it terribly when I was gone.

That first night back, I laid down in a borrowed bed and buried my dreams in the fabric of life. I had nothing to tell anyone before I went under the spell of night. I had nowhere to be. In my own way, I had no friends. In my own way, I had no life. The patterns of life lived wore into my tired soul. I knew I needed them, those tracks in my skin and in my head. The tracks that hinted at my soul's torn and tired flagging in a long night of dying to self. There was no self left after five years of love and killing. My eyes would close, but the racket of all the screaming life kept me awake.

Thirty five tons of machine had been landing above me, barely thirty feet of steel and working men was all between me and that noise. I slept as I never have under all that noise in a two foot box. In my other stations I had lived in poor ghettos where the sounds of life took on the screaming noises of people. Parties and cars and loud thudding sorts of music. I had slept there in that noise fine. I could sleep through that.

I laid here that first night home. On my queen sized bed that seemed so obscenely large after the life I had lived before, that friends were still living. That I still lived in steel and nitrate dreams. I could not sleep.

Noises would startle me awake with their random sounds of life. I would wake and jolt up, searching for threats. My heart would rocket off into tachycardic who knows what. My breathing would slowly return to me. The little white country room in a little white country house would return to me. So would She.

As a ghost. As a ghoul. She was supposed to be home with me someday. Not living in a hotel working, as they say. She was not supposed to be left behind.

My eyes closed and I listened to the symphony of chaos. I couldn't sleep.