Murder Music

The forces that animate my body are so irritable during this slice of night, after all the network TV worth watching has gone off and everyone I can talk to is asleep. It's not that I can't sleep. I just can't stop. The little man in the engine room keeps shoveling the coal in. I just took 3mg of melatonin, near guaranteed to make even someone my size fall out. Its effects are apparent, but I can't keep myself from typing, reading, watching the odd advertisement for cheap auto loans and colon flushes. Some directive from my mesolimbic system, the deep well of desire, means I can't stop until I collapse.

My noisy computer puts out a whine that no doubt will contribute to hearing loss someday. The Faculty plays on the TV adjacent to my monitor. I'm spending an inordinate amount of energy scrying whether I'm more attracted to Josh Hartnett or Jordana Brewster. The exanimate separation that marks my lifelong tenancy in the twilight hours is powerful, and it bleeds into the rest of my days. On a day off, I can go from waking to sleeping without talking to another human. It feels right, but in that messed-up way that beating, ravaging, destroying someone feels right. It's justified by the same apparatus which reasons a journal as a working substitute for a shrink.

I want love, but I don't need romance. I want someone to play videogames with, to sit on the couch and burp with, to enjoy the dismal in-between moments that are building up, unused, in my timeline. The wonderful tactile motions of my body pressed against another keep flitting through my mind, the savory tang of lust ever on my taste buds. I don't know how to get to a point where I feel capable of dating someone else, leaving the question of my own desirability unanswered without being asked. I suppose I always held out for the day when I found someone broken in the same way that I am, and questions of gender, sex, and attraction would be thrown out the window, in favor of the knowledge that our identical fears of being alone would no longer have merit.

I'm not a good writer, but I wish I could speak as well as I do write. Caught in the moment, all of my well-prepared phrases and beats fail me, and I'm just so often stuck. I'm done tonight. There's nothing else to do.