The Calm I'm Not Permitted to Enter

There are nights I can't stand the version of me the dark hands back.

The late nights are the worst. Not because anything happens — because nothing does. All day the noise keeps a distance between me and myself, and the moment it falls away I'm left alone with the one person I'm never allowed to leave. The night brings no new thoughts. It just pulls back the curtain the day keeps drawn, and I finally see what I've spent all day getting good at not seeing.

To hate yourself you have to become two people: one who watches and one who is watched, and both of them are me. I step outside and look at what's left as if it were a stranger I can't bear the sight of. I know every excuse he's going to make before he makes it. I've heard the case against him so many times I could deliver it myself, and most nights I do.

I walk through the ashes of everything I used to burn for. The passions are cold now; I carry them anyway, the way you carry a body you haven't figured out where to put down. I drag the same baggage from one day into the next, and I already know I'll drag it into whatever comes after.

And the cruelest part isn't that peace is gone. It's that I can hear it. It keeps speaking, close enough to make out, calling me by name — and I can't reach it. Absence I could survive; you forget what stays away long enough. But this doesn't stay away. It stands one step off, audible, and I can't cross the step. I'm at war with the one thing I know would save me.

I don't have a clean ending for this. Some nights become a single sentence I say over and over, a prayer with no one on the other side of it. I hear it call. I don't reach it. The night finishes, the next one comes, and I say it again.