Fucked Off

When I was a kid, my family and I stayed in a house on the beach during the summer. I would sit for hours at the edge of the water, letting it lap up against my legs as my shoulders grew hot in the sun. I didn’t do much, I just sat and thought and hummed aimlessly to myself as I worked my fingers in the sand.

At night everybody turned off their lights or closed their curtains since loggerhead turtles nested on the beach and light would confuse the giant leviathan mothers as they came to lay their eggs on the same beach where they had flopped down into the waters maybe a century ago or confuse the babies that could return in another century as leviathans.

The stars would then come out, the shrimping boats on the horizon and the nearest major city - over an hour’s drive away - produced little enough light pollution so that you could see the Milky Way, really see it, smeared across the sky while the moon rose behind you, inland from the gulf.

Already a seasoned insomniac, I would climb up the carpeted stairs smelling that motel-not-home smell and I would slip out the door at the very top, onto the roof of the house where there was a deck.

Sometimes I would be in my pajamas when I padded up to the roof but often I would pull of my pajamas and leave them on my bed, wrapping up my nakedness in a cotton sheet. That was the best way, the warm night breeze off the gulf not cold enough to give me a chill. It was the most naked I’ve ever felt, but I felt every solid inch of my body as the sheet pressed against it with the force of the wind.

And I would lie on the splintery wooden deck and look up at that smear of stars until my eyelids started to get heavy. Then I would slip back down the stairs and into bed, the foreign smell of the house keeping me company until the next morning.

Tonight i was tired.

Tired the way you are when you don’t know when the next time you won’t be tired will be.

Tired the way you are when you’re trying to find someone who doesn’t exist any more.

i curled up under my cotton sheet. But this time, i wasn’t solid or naked.