Waking up is the hardest part. Between the dream and the warmth of the sheets, there is a denial of the world outside, there is a safe place from which you do not want to crawl out of. There on box springs and mattresses. There’s hope that the life you are living is not your own, that for a brief moment, everything hangs and it hangs away from your reach.
Then something crumbles away from your eyes. Something loosens and you begin to slip, as if you were falling upward, as if the cliché was true all along: you can’t take it with you, and you suddenly shake with the small fear that this was all indeed a dream and there’s a mild horror in that, that you were falling in love with a dream and that you were safe and now you never were, now the funhouse begins all over again and you can’t do a damn thing about it.
All sleep begins with denial, that you are not in danger, that the world is quiet enough for you to close your eyes to, that you can simply turn your back on everything and not expect anything to happen. That it’ll all still be there when you’re done.
I spend so much time sleeping because what lies in my hands rots and stews and stinks up the inside of my nostrils: the tracks are well worn and the scabs have yet to heal. I haven’t touched a needle, or let a needle touch me for years, but the sores are the same nonetheless. Like yesterday. Like her hands putting the pressure on the thigh and holding the bit between her teeth.
I would see it all spread out and bend and the corners of her eyes become like snakes, like rabid rats crawling up my crotch and this gentle stroking in my head for her to bite and feed on my scrotum and we would tumble and pass out and the next thing you know awake and starving and sick of each other, sick to our stomachs crawling through living rooms out of houses, into calm morning streets to find some idiot to pay for the next hit. But I had it all together. No one had a handle on me.