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.
