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some wakeful night
Feedback welcome on style, method, and mechanics. As far as the story goes, it's real life I can't change the plot, only the way I tell it.
Unable to sleep. I realized I was storing up tension in my head like some self-destructive battery. But every time I stop consciously thinking about relaxing my jaws clench. My head aches.
So I get up, get a drink, and listen to music. My mind flits across different things. Perhaps because of exhaustion I think, "this is the kind of night I'd get a call from L." L. was crazy. Not pleasantly crazy but completely unhinged. For weeks, or was it months, she would call me every night drunk, depressed, and talking about suicide. And I would lie there in bed through the wee hours of the night not hanging up. I considered it my penance for my depression, for the burden I've placed on my friends, for not loving her like she wanted me to. She pulled out all the stops to try to make me love her. she tried the same sad manipulations I would have tried, I did try, when I was sixteen. It was a slow torture like the drip of water in a quiet room. I would lie there at night falling asleep dreading the ring of the phone. But each night I would answer. It wasn't an option not to.
Later, when she had moved away and was offering friendship without all the baggage I couldn't properly respond. The arrival of each correspondence filled me with dread and doom without the ray of light of pleasant memories. If half the tales she told were true, she lived an incredible life. But I came in at the worst point. Like most stories in real life, this one has no point, no conclusion.
Unable to sleep. I realized I was storing up tension in my head like some self-destructive battery. But every time I stop consciously thinking about relaxing my jaws clench. My head aches.
So I get up, get a drink, and listen to music. My mind flits across different things. Perhaps because of exhaustion I think, "this is the kind of night I'd get a call from L." L. was crazy. Not pleasantly crazy but completely unhinged. For weeks, or was it months, she would call me every night drunk, depressed, and talking about suicide. And I would lie there in bed through the wee hours of the night not hanging up. I considered it my penance for my depression, for the burden I've placed on my friends, for not loving her like she wanted me to. She pulled out all the stops to try to make me love her. she tried the same sad manipulations I would have tried, I did try, when I was sixteen. It was a slow torture like the drip of water in a quiet room. I would lie there at night falling asleep dreading the ring of the phone. But each night I would answer. It wasn't an option not to.
Later, when she had moved away and was offering friendship without all the baggage I couldn't properly respond. The arrival of each correspondence filled me with dread and doom without the ray of light of pleasant memories. If half the tales she told were true, she lived an incredible life. But I came in at the worst point. Like most stories in real life, this one has no point, no conclusion.