Listening to: "Hurt" by Johnny Cash
Nothing good ever happens at three in the morning. That is what my dad once told me.
How did they sneak in there? Trailing down my cheeks in a line of glory? The bite of the AC cuts into the tracks of tears. Silent. Deadly. Tears. Some cry when they fall and get hurt, others because they are grieving over something important ending in their life: boyfriends leaving, fathers dying, or even the simplicity of rejection. Me? I cry when those bottled emotions spill into a frenzy where control is near impossible. I teeter on the edge of my emotions. It’s like a see-saw between control and chaos. Let’s nail it shut into balance. I would like to cry during a movie when the actress gets that long waited kiss or when I lose a job to someone less qualified. If I did allow myself to lose the clarity of that oh so constricting control there would be no end to the tears or pain. It’s a dam, a little leak destroys the entirely well constructed wall in a flood of destruction and never-ending pouring.
You know in those movies where the blood from a gunshot seems so controlled and clean-cut. You flinch at the sudden pain you know comes with that sort of injury. That pain goes away. That pain has an end with rehabilitation. Doctors fix that pain. Medicine masks the torture of cells stitching themselves together, bones producing those rigid fibers and the nerves stretching out to warn of the impending dangers. Internal pain from this injury isn’t clean cut, the bleeding isn’t controlled. You place pressure on one bleeding wound and another sprouts up. No one flinches at the pain: the dulling pain that drugs can’t mask and cells cannot stitch away. This mental bruise creates those moments when you look at your hand directing the knife and wonder what it would feel like kissing your skin oh so gently. The invisible lesion in the heart has you calculating the risk factor of accelerating your car into a tree, a pole, a lake. Which creates more pain, fixable, curable pain? How long would that mask the wounds so deep even you are still putting together this puzzle of no voice?
One can just continue to live their life. Stand when the water gets too deep. Kneel in the rain. Lie during a storm. On sunny days dance at the glory and bask in the happiness of the leap. When you get lost in the sheets all you can do is dangle your hand over the edge and hope you can pull yourself out of the tangled knot. Everyone knows about those late nights when the cold seeps through the cracks of protection from blankets that lie flat, while the pillow becomes the knight of loneliness, as you cradle those feathers as if they too could battle the losing war of empty arms.
Nothing good ever happens at three am. I am starting to believe the tales of my father. Three am holds no glory. Watching it tick past lets the walls of control disappear too quickly for my hands to grasp the smoke of my barricades, my straight jacket.
