I lie awake at night.
Around me, in all directions, a few feet away, there are other bodies. The walls between us are thin. Other bodies lying down, wrapped in blankets, asleep. Other bodies next to other bodies, sharing the same bed. I can almost hear them, the way they turn, how their breath shifts the covers. I don’t dream. I stare at blank walls.
I think something is wrong with me. The doctor said I should have better sleep hygiene and that these issues with sleep are normal when a person gets older, the doctor said this is normal. I think something is wrong with me.
When I sleep it is like this: hot and short. I wake with a head full of cotton, before the sun is up. The inside of my body is stuffed, a room with no ventilation.
I speak with people, I say I am tired. They nod. Everyone is tired. I think something is wrong with me.
Let me tell you where I live. I live in a city of summer, unending warmth. In the middle months, June, July, August, it is hard to be outside at any time of day. The morning heat presses down on everything. The plants wilt. It doesn’t get cold for the rest of the year, only less hot. The people here are soft and arrogant because they have never known winter.
In the mornings I go to work and think about dying. I think it would be easier. I can’t take a day off work, I always want to take a day off work. I would like to sleep all morning, to lie unconscious as the hot bright day passes by outside my window. At work there is a policy. A person can only call out sick once per four-month period. I have to choose my sick days carefully; I have to choose my sicknesses carefully. Which is bad enough to stay home for? Which is worth the risk, that a worse thing will not happen next month? I don’t like gambling. I have never been to a casino.
At night, when enough time has passed and I know that sleep will not come, I get dressed. Sometimes it’s three in the morning. Sometimes it’s midnight. Sometimes I don’t check the time. I get dressed in the darkness. The doctor said that turning on more lights can trick the brain into thinking it is daytime. I leave my apartment, outside is dark. There are streetlights. Little is moving.
I walk down the streets and count the cars, which ones I’ve seen before. This is not a city for walking. I live near a wide street where the motors scream. They have given the street a pretty name, to hide from what it really is. A place not made for humans. The sidewalk is thin. The sidewalk ends sometimes. I keep walking. It is better than sitting alone in my room without motion.
Cars go past and past. Their engines demand attention.
The way I walk is this: unhalting. I leave my apartment, lock the door. My apartment is on the third floor and is not the top. My door opens to a patio, an outdoor walkway. I take the stairs, one foot on each one. It is important not to skip. The heat around me at night is a blanket, wrapped around every breath. From the stairs, through the parking lot full of machines. Big things that cost more than my yearly salary. Pieces of metal and oil more valuable than my life. There is the Ford truck, overflowing its parking spot. There, the curves of an SUV.
I imagine the lives of the people who own these things. I go to work and I go home and I know somewhere other people are doing something else, but I don’t know what and I don’t know how.
I turn, walk the sidewalk overgrown with dying plants, brown and cracked. It is so hot, nothing can grow, no matter how much water is poured daily. There are houses, single story, with square yards. This is where I live.
*
It’s not safe to walk at night like I do, where I do. I’m not sure how else to spend the hours.
If I were to spread my fingers, place them on the ground as tents, hold up my body by my fingers and my knees and slide through the city on my belly, I don’t think anything would change. I don’t think anyone would notice. I think something is wrong with me. I think this counts as desperation.
*
The doctor said the walking is hard on my knees. I should bend them for the sake of the joint. I try this. It turns my walks into hobbles but the doctor is right, it hurts less.
*
I used to hear the peacocks call in the mornings, at night. Their calling.
I can’t put any of this on Instagram.
*
Once, there were hands that held me all night. Once, legs intertwined with my own. They’re not here anymore, so there’s no use talking about them.
My bed creaks when I lay down. It creaks when I get up. My muscles echo.
*
Sometimes I get home with twigs in my hair. I don’t know how they got there. When the moon is out, I walk faster. It watches. I run.
*
I make new appointments with new doctors. They repeat the same sentences. I’m fine. Nothing is wrong. I should keep an eye on my knees.
*
I can’t remember the last time I cut my hair. Sometimes, in the mornings after a night, every strand is dry and cracking. “You look like a dog,” they tell me at work. I said yes. Feral. But a dog can find its way home. I have seen every street and keep walking. I walk and walk and always come back to the same place.
*
At night I stare at the ceiling. I wait for the light from outside to shift. It doesn’t. Streetlights don’t move. I am always too awake. The ceiling is solid. I don’t know how to fix any of this. I open my mouth. The sound that comes out wakes every neighbor.
Someone pounds on the door screaming. An animal must be hurt. What kind of animal. I wait until they leave, go walking. This is not alienation. This is something in my brain. There is no place here to scream without someone hearing.
*
The days are the same. There is a job. There is home. I stare out the window at a sunset so beautiful I think it wants to kill me. I want to be out in it, feel the air on my skin, but what I can do except walk. Where is there to go.
The world the way it is now, there is no simple way to take it down. I could tear my clothes in a busy street and cars would honk for me to get out of the way. Someone would post it online, and the world continues unchanged.
When I was young and still believed in things, I thought I could change something. Reroute the direction of the world, make a difference, make something better. I have lost something. I think that thing is hope.
Something is supposed to happen. There is supposed to be some other kind of movement, some kind of progression. Instead, the days are the same and the same and the same, punctured by nights, punctured by moons.
Sometimes when I walk, I look at the moon like a betrayal. I used to stare at it, filled with wonder. Now it looks down on me in judgement. What have I done with my life. What has happened. I think something is wrong with me. Sometimes I look at the moon and wail. I cry. I do not try to quiet myself. People look out of windows. Their heads, their arms. They yell. It’s so late. It’s so late and I have woken them with my screaming. I don’t tell them I’m sorry. My bones crack. I go like I always go. My knees buckle just enough. I go screaming beneath a moon that will never do anything to help me.
*
Before there was this there was something else. I slept through the night. I woke to a peacock in the yard. Its colors were not taunting. It was blue and green and bright. There were people I saw in the morning. People I talked with in the evening. People who didn’t think I was a dog. People who did but didn’t care. There were hands that were not afraid of what I am. Hands that held me close at night. I think something is wrong with me.
*
I met someone on a bridge once. I don’t think it’s worth remembering. He loved me like a pet. An uncaged wild animal. I didn’t want to be a pet.
The night we met the moon was full over the water. He took my hand. He took my mouth. He stayed for a while. He stayed for months. He ate all my howls. Then he left and put them back.
I could describe him. He looks like this: human. I don’t know what more there is to say.
*
My feet get dirty. I no longer understand the point of cleaning them.
*
I didn’t mean to kill it. No one believes me. When a peacock calls its voice goes over rooftops. It’s call moves from one note to one another, low to high. It only sings those two notes. A peacock can fly. Not very far. Not very fast. A peacock can be blue. It can be albino, white. I used to watch peacocks waddle down the street in the morning. A peacock travels with others. I don’t think I ever saw a peacock alone.
No one believes me. They threw me out of that place yelling. How could I. What had I become. A dog. An animal. A beast.
A peacock’s blood is the same color as any other blood. A peacock can never be the only thing keeping someone alive. An albino peacock is a little moon. Round and white. A peacock moon can come closer. I couldn’t hold myself back. I just wanted to see it, what it was like. It was day and the peacock wasn’t alone and I wanted to touch it. I thought maybe I could change back to something like human. I got too close. It ran into the street. It ran further into the street. The car didn’t stop in time. The car didn’t stop at all.
The creature in my arms didn’t know it was dying. The other peacocks ran away. None of them checked on this one. Abandoned with me. I didn’t try to stop the bleeding. I put a hand to my mouth and tasted the rust of its dying blood. I didn’t mean to. It got all over my body. It got all over my face.
I didn’t mean for it to die. It wasn’t an accident. I wanted to hold every part of this little moon. I thought maybe the insides could fix me. I thought maybe I could learn to call in two notes. A peacock doesn’t scream. A peacock calls. I thought I could burrow to the inside of the moon and stop whatever was wrong with me. I dug and my nails got dirty. I didn’t find a thing.
*
I tell the doctors that I can’t sleep at night. They say no one can. They say nothing is wrong with me.
*
My howl is one note. It is long and no one wants it.
*
The moon will never come closer. It will not change anything. I change beneath it. I am a body of howls. I am a scream trapped in a body. At night I can’t sleep. I walk to the bridge. I stand above the waters and stare up at the unmoving sky. I can’t change myself back.
A dog, they call me at work.
Yes, I said.
Madeline Vosch writes fiction and nonfiction. Her first book, Undead: a Memoir, is forthcoming from Beacon Press. An excerpt of her memoir was selected as the winner of the Ploughshares Emerging Writer Contest in 2021. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, The Offing, and The Rumpus, among others.
Image: flickr.com
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