When the stars couldn't stare back one more night, I felt empty. The night sky, my best friend, was turning its back on me. I had no winking eyes to give me comfort. Their cloud eyelids closed to me, just crying, sobbing onto me. My tear drenched clothing dripped onto the static ants walking by. It was freezing that night. Every breath I took, I had to chew and swallow in order not to choke. The cold metal bars of the fire escape dug into me like claws of a bear as I smoked cigarette after cigarette, hoping to suspend time, to keep the night lasting forever. I shivered, holding myself close, unable to go inside for fear of missing something, anything out amongst the city.
A crash-bang stole my attention, a brief moment of infidelity to my city as I stole a glimpse inside. The fire was mischievously jumping in the fireplace as my two roommates threw knives at a dartboard, drunkenly swaying as if on a rocking boat. The knives were shakily thrown and would hit, CLANG, and miss and fall to the floor, THUD, followed by a hideous sickly laughter. The ghostly glow of the television played with the fire and created extra friends to sway in tune with my roommates on the wall, mocking them and their throws, every once in a while jumping to show off their agility even while drunk.
Back outside, around me was the city with its shimmering lights, the ominous structures in the distance mocking me, reflecting what the stars could do if they really loved me; bursting to the brim with people, it's overwhelming noise attacking me from every which way. In this place, darkness can never truly exist, silence is just an afterthought. Below me on the sidewalk, the twitching malfunctioning cyborgs struggled to find solace from the rain; the tiny, frozen daggers of droplets slicing through their clothing and their cicuits. Cars drove by, angrily yelling out incomprehensible expletives by their owners command and racing each other to get to their important destinations first.
Even in that rain, I could still smell all the food from my neighborhood restaurants, like the Pied Piper’s music wafting up to me, calling to me. After nearly a month without really eating, my stomach lurched with want. The hunger clawed at my insides. I lit another cigarette, letting the smoke fuel me, to essentially feed me. I let the steel wool smoke fill my throat and lungs, scraping it's way down; clearing my mind, letting me think once more. When the city sparkled back at my own confused self, I had nothing but my memories. They dripped slowly from the IV of my mind, reminding me of what I really was losing. One thought after the other, dripping and getting lost with everything else. I grasped with desperate hope to each memory, trying to organize them, keep them in order, but when you really try to organize your thoughts, it all gets jumbled in a never ending mass. And that mass, all mixed together, is left for your brain to decipher and choose which ones are better than the other and it all just gets lost in the tundra, but it can't really be a tundra when all of this is going on. It's just suffocating as the two dimensional world closes in around you.
One drip brought me back to the night I left home. I was the rebellious version of Wendy and like a kid in an after school special, giving my parents the figurative finger as I flew out the window (hopped into a car) with Peter and one of his lost boys. Laughing as we flew, on a high from the impending freedom.
The next drip brought me a few weeks into living there. The thump, THUMP, THUMPING of our landlords music infiltrating our every pore, making sleep impossible. With all of us staying up all hours of the night, we were just wandering through a waking dream. In our sleep deprived stupors, we started to come up with fantastical ideas on how to use the apartment. The fire escape was now our smoking patio. Our fireplace also became a stove of sorts, camping out in our frozen apartment in the wilderness of the city, cooking our food like mountain men.
When Jason's dad had come to visit, he brought the house a bit of a strange gift, a set of throwing knives. We were super excited until: 1.We realized we both didn't know how to use such things and 2.There was no where for us to practice to learn such things. One excessively ridiculous night, however, we came up with a glorious plan. We took a large piece of cardboard and nailed it to the wall, then on top of that, put up our dart board. In our infinite wisdom, we believed this would be the best way to protect the wall. Then we began to practice, kind of. Our throws were terrible, ricocheting off of the dartboard, and coming back to almost hit us. We made gashes in the cardboard, going completely through, into the wall. That side of the room started to look legitimately like frightening horror movie style murders had occurred there. It was wonderful.
The next drip took me to when I finally got a job, for little while. My boss was Lizzie, known affectionately by her friends as “Lizzie the Lezzie.” She cared less about my less than pristine ability as an employee than about how she wanted to show me her side of San Fransisco. A whirl wind of driving and outings. One in particular being the night she brought me to a lesbian bar and made me dance with someone because I was “too cute to be straight!” she screamed across the bar.
As I sat out on the patio that last night, feeling the rain and the cold; watching the lights flicker in the distance; hearing the cars blaring by; I could think of how I had to leave in less than twelve hours and every part of me was lost. This city, my only real experience with freedom, my only hope for a break from stagnancy, was all I had. Three months of starving and endless wandering was all I needed. Going back to my home, the only home I ever knew, was something I needed, yet dreaded. It's not wrong to want to go where no one knows you. And it's not wrong to not really want to go back to where everyone knows you. But my heart ached to remain in this world of never ending childhood and yet my only real view of what I truly wanted as an adult. I knew this was it.
Now, four years later, I still want it. I'm not without want for somewhere new, I need to feel like a naïve child, wandering senselessly, unaffected by danger, worried by nothing, by my own time constraints of discovering everything. I am empty, broken. Sure, it may be selfish, but no relationship can sustain my never ending wanderlust, I will never veer from the need to travel to the new never land. I am Peter. I will never be Wendy again. I don't know what age is the “norm”, but for me, the night I turned twenty two, everything began to fall apart all over again. New realizations and epiphanies hit me in every which way, paralyzing me, causing me to double over in non-sensical emotional outbursts. There are only so many understandings of these hopes and dreams. And to realize that epiphanies are only the small part of it. Because it's moments like these you now understand what it means to have an autoclave for a heart. And that numbness, that empty feeling inside isn't senseless. You're not lost in selfish bullshit. The leaking coming from you isn't wrong because it's some sort of emotion again. You're not blank. Numb isn't real. It's a lack of what you need/want. Because you're not broken for knowing that your whole existence feels wrong.
