Chapter 2

When you finally open your eyes, the sun is nearing its late New England fall peak in the sky. It must be around noon. You lie in bed with your eyes closed pretending to sleep.

It's "Suck it up Saturday" you finally convince yourself and get up to toast a bagel and put on coffee so you can have a cigarette. You take a quick shower and pack up your laptop before you have a chance to decide to turn on the TV again. Maybe you check your e-mail first while having your morning smoke, the "Retrieving 10 messages from server" notice inevitably resulting in 10 pieces of junk mail that when deleted leave your inbox empty. You try not to think about what you are hoping will be there, and how it isn't coming, and how you wouldn't know what to do with it if it did show up, marked in bold as an unread letter.

It's too cold to ride today but you grab your motorcycle helmet anyway and throw your backpack over your leather jacket and sweatshirt and ride down to the bookstore cafe to work on some documents due on Monday, knowing that any longer in the house and you'd risk spending another day unshowered on the couch.

Maybe you really want some human contact, or maybe you're just acutely aware of the downward spiral of depression, and don't want to follow that path. Again.

Either way, you find yourself ordering a latte and booting up your laptop at a table in a busy bookstore, surrounded by people chatting and sharing their life with friends, family, and lovers. Surrounded by holiday decoration and price points and music, wondering if this was really the best choice of places to go when it's the holidays that brought your head where it is in the first place.

As your latte cools and you work your way to the bottom of the paper cup, absorbed in your work - life's only other real distraction besides the TV - you look up and catch the eye of a cute girl a few tables away. She's sitting kitty-corner from where you sit, facing you, with a pile of school books and notepads open and pink earbuds tucked neatly into her ears under her long blonde hair. She smiles back at you and looks away shyly, then looks back quickly and tucks her hair behind her ear. You didn't notice her when you sat down. You wonder if she chose that spot in order to catch your eye.

At best, she's way too young for you, probably home from school for Thanksgiving. At best, you remind her of someone she cares about. Someone who isn't you.

You turn back to your work and the smile fades from your face.

"It's got to be cold riding today," she says to you from across the tables.

You look down at your helmet on the table next to your laptop. You consciously bring the smile back to just the corners of your mouth and eyes in order to appear non-threatening, a trick someone you once cared about very deeply taught you, because, according to her, you looked scary and angry when you were concentrating. You look up at the girl.

"Yeah it's freezing. Not sure what I was thinking."

Maybe you aren't at all interested in talking with her, but you can't turn down conversation. It's impossible to avoid flirting with a pretty girl, once that starts it's a genetic imperative that a man follow it through to see where he can take it. Whether he wants to or not.

So you engage in a little small talk, ask her where she goes to school (Boston University), how she likes living in the city, sharing a few stories about when you lived there in a failed attempt to finish school yourself, trying not to think about or give away the fact that at best she was in diapers when you were her age, and then another kid just off the training wheels himself comes in wearing a Gap sweater and striped scarf and gives her a big kiss on the lips and hugs her and you are left alone to your work once again.

Maybe you try not to think about whether or not to her you were that lonely older guy at the bookstore who looked like he needed a five-minute charity friend. Maybe you think a little too much about whether or not she found you attractive instead, while you try to return your focus to the document you are working on.

Your phone vibrates once in your pocket, and you take it out to read a text from a girl you just started seeing. She's apologizing for not calling you last night, explaining she was out with friends and didn't get home until late. You wonder why she's apologizing, you didn't expect her to call. Hoped she would, maybe, but not expected. Maybe you hoped that she'd ring you up in the middle of the night all drunk and suggest that she come over and roll around under the covers with you, but she didn't. Maybe you hoped she would, but you certainly didn't expect her to.

You don't answer her text, instead slipping your phone back into your pocket and trying to concentrate on your work. The late morning turns into late afternoon, and the sun which finally made an appearance today after struggling to break through rain and clouds all week makes its way to the mountains. You realize that if you don't head back home soon the roads will risk turning icy, and you pack up your things and carry your helmet towards the parking lot.

The setting sun took with it the little bit of warmth it brought to the day, and it is damn cold riding back. You start to shiver under your layers, and your wrists between the cuffs of your jacket and your gloves are starting to feel numb. Fortunately you don't have far to go to get back to the relative warmth of your dark, empty house.

Chapter 1

The TV is on, casting its cold luminous glow into the otherwise pitch dark room. You watch it intently from within your cocoon of blankets on the couch because when you do this it is the only time you can't hear your own thoughts. Instead, you hear the words and feelings and tribulations of others, and you know it's not real.

You turn up the volume until the floor shakes with thunder because then, at least until the next commercial, you don't remember the string of broken hopes and dissolved families left behind in your life since childhood, the people you brought so close to your heart only to eventually and inevitably find that you weren't in theirs. You do this so that you don't hear your own voice in your head wondering what went wrong, where things went bad, what you could have done differently, whether anyone out there will ever truly let you in the way you do them.

Whether that's even humanly possible, or if you are just an anomaly.

Maybe you contemplate suicide. Maybe you picture the pistol against your head, cold steel wrapped around a trigger you would never pull, a phantom utility of silence that you will never seek out.

Maybe you envision riding your motorcycle off of a cliff, a mountain rising high into a desert that you will never see, hurtling into a physical abyss that seems trivial compared to the mental one you live in from time to time. Maybe instead you pour another drink in the darkness, even though you don't want it.

Turth is, you'd never take your own life. Not quickly, anyway.

You don't feel ashamed of this. Instead, you are embarassed that you still feel hope. You haven't hardened against the bitter wind of life. You still want to love, to be loved, to feel joy in your heart. You don't know any other way.

It is who you are.

When the show ends and you trade the couch for the blankets of your bed, smelling strongly of laundry detergent, a string of faces of women, of friends, of family runs through your head.

Maybe you wonder if you were ever special to any of them. Maybe you try to figure out if anyone could ever think you are worth loving, worth dying for, worth sacrificing for. Maybe you think about whether or not any of them ever think of you, lying awake in their beds, and probably you decide that they don't.

You roll over, but the thoughts follow.

You don't remember dreaming, but science says that everyone dreams every time we fall asleep, our subconscious mind trying to tell us what we don't hear it saying when we are awake. Either way, the sun rises in the morning and you do not.