Aerials

In the darkness of my room, I lay awake unable to sleep. Time; I have lost track of by now. My cell phone was now an object of drained batteries, a waste. The last time I checked, it was somewhere around one in the morning. There was no clock on the wall, nor an alarm clock on the wooden dresser beside me, so who knew how long had passed since then. I usually used my cell phone to tell me this information, but it only produced a flash of light after pressing the on button for a few seconds then, back to darkness against my pillow. I grabbed the phone once more and chucked it off my bed with irritation. With a thud, it hit the floor. Even though I expected the sound, I still felt my heart leap out of my chest.

I lay awake, wide-eyed in my bed, with thoughts racing in my mind. My heart feeling like it was beating to the changes in my thoughts. I tried to shake each one loose, but to no avail. I tried counting back from one-hundred, counting sheep and other countless, useless things that I learned in my childhood. I should have known better, if it did not work then, why would it work now? It was absolutely no help at all wasting my time on those methods. Thinking of it, either way I would still be awake in my room, but at least that would pass the time.

I continued to lay there in almost silence; my breathing and the ticking of the grandfather clock in the hall occupied the nighttime air. I wanted to hold my breath as the thoughts constantly ran through my mind. Fall asleep, you need sleep, sleep please sleep, save your thinking for morning. I knew I was exhausted after today, correction I was more than exhausted. I was drained, so much had happened, too much had happened. I couldn’t grasp it all at once. I had been captured by a sea of confusion, tossing in the waves of a conflicted reality. Some things felt too real, while other parts felt like I was in a dream full of fantasy and unrealistic possibilities. I just want to sleep.

Begging for sleep to come didn’t work either, so I chose to stay in my over-sized bed looking up at the ceiling with desperate eyes. It didn't matter if I had my eyes open or shut, the same images arranged themselves in the texture of the painted ceiling and in my mind. The images turned into scenes, the scenes into events, and the events into the memories of last night. Even when I would blink, the visuals never ended. I was consumed.

He puzzled me, even after all this time. Four weeks seem like a short time to figure one out, but I can do it in a matter of days, even seconds. I get people. I know personalities, ticks, habits, body language down to the minute details, but him, he was a mystery. Left and right, he threw curve balls. Just when I would be close to figure out one, he threw another, and another, until I was left with so many questions. I wished for answers, but now in a way I regret it. Could I be suffering from a form of shell shock or is my logic conflicting, leaving me here like an insomniac? My mind, my eyes and my heart lost in the events of last night. I should have known from that moment on, things were going to be interesting.
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A month before this night of irritating sleeplessness, I was on my way to my newest home, New York. A few days earlier, my Aunt Melinda sat me down and said that I would be leaving to go live with some Great-Aunt who I had never met before. It was nerve wrecking to hear that. Mostly due to the fact that it would be like living with a complete stranger who knew little to nothing about you, for an unknown amount of time. I would be staying until ‘things settled down between my parents’ but I knew the real reasons.

I was not a child anymore, I did not need to hear those lies. It was just another pathetic excuse to use a baby blanket to cover and shelter me from the cold hard truth of the real world. I did not feel the need to argue with them or to pull information out of them. I had no desire to listen to their elaborate versions of the story and explanation of the whys and hows. I knew their versions were too well rehearsed, and I was too skeptical to take is as the truth. I knew exactly why they were doing this; it was their nature to. Protect the young, shelter them from the “evils” in the world, the dark times in the past. Essentially, have them grow up properly without all this ‘tragic, gaudy drama’. Their bottom line was that I would not have to worry about what had exactly gone on. Seriously, do you want me to be a hermit? I would always repress saying that but it was not worth it to waste my breath. It still irritated me that they were always treating me like a little kid. I’ll never understand that. I knew about the addictions, the affairs, and the fights. I was not ignorant and blind, hell, I grew up watching this through my own eyes. I could see everything that was going on, I knew what they knew, sometimes even more.

For as long as I had known my mom, she was an addict. Risk and dangerous, compulsive behaviors were her past times. The word in front of addict would change but it did not matter. One word would stay the same: addict. Most of my memories of her consist of her strung out, drunk, high or passed out. I never knew her to be a real mom. She was not strict, responsible or even morally right. She was everything but the cookie cutter mom.

The family of hermits as I liked to call them, never understood the cause of her addictions. It was safe to assume that whatever caused her problems caused them to adapt this hermit like behavior, labeling many topics “bad” or “unnecessary” by their conservative views. Questioning or talking about that was obviously off limits. The stories of my infancy consisted of ‘your mother was the happiest mother I could have ever found’ and ‘those were the good old days’. How truthful these statements were, again I didn't know. It was a mystery to me as much as her story full of these the unlikely turn of events.

But, they did not know the rules. Rule number One: I am not what you think I am. You will never expect what will become of me.