Friday Morning 3am

Friday morning, 3am, I'm awake because sleep eludes me. Mr. Sandman has gone out drinking with my friend Beryl, no doubt, and subsequently neglected his charge in sending me off to slumber. It's cold. The crispness of the witching-hour air clings to my naked chest, draping itself over me like a ghostly sheet of un-life. Outside my window the silence of deep-night has spread into every corner and crevice, the dark broken but barely by the pale light of the moon. She floats silently overhead, smiling and keeping watch over us from the comfort of her star-studded heaven. Is this the time to be reflecting on the events which have transpired these past few days? In the silence of this hour my mind is filled with a confusing array of questions, accusations, assumptions, realizations and regrets. When I close my eyes I find no comfort from the pain which has become my companion, sitting on my shoulder or trailing in my shadow; always present and never far away. There was a time when I could find peace within the dark rooms of my mind. Now I find only echoes. Echoes of his heart-wrenching sobs, his crystalline tears and the sound of my own heart being torn into innumerable tiny pieces. The light from the laptop screen is hurting my eyes, piercing through the veil and pulling my soul out into the world and into words. What has become of us? Where did we go so terribly off track? How could I be so completely blind to how distant and withdrawn I had become, and the pain it was causing him? I fight back the tears for they want to revel in my sadness once again. Its 3am and silence abound. In a couple of hours the sun will rise and the world will come alive. Life does go on I suppose, but not in the way I would like it to right now. It's as though I am caught in the slipstream of some cosmic monster that's pulling me in a direction I do not want to go, but that I am powerless to resist. My tired eyes are heavy and my heart is beating slow. Sleep has not come for many a night, and it is starting to show. I'll turn off the light just now and try once again to coax my mind into slumber and my thoughts into rest, but I know that when I close my eyes and wander the hallways of my mind-house he will be there around every corner and behind every door. He will be everywhere except where he should be...which is next to me.