Sigh No More

I like to sleep in my own bed. I hate waking up on the floor. I know nothing sketchy happened, but I always feel gross anyway. Maybe I wouldn’t do this so often if it didn’t seem like your youth was the time to do it. Maybe I shouldn’t do this at all. But what else do I do on Friday nights? I work and then I shower. And then I miss my brother. Then I miss having a full house. And I wonder if I got left behind because I’m the youngest or because I’m the only one who can take care of so many sick people. But that makes me so tired—not tired enough to sleep, I can’t really sleep right after work anyway, but I shouldn’t go to these things; I should slow down. I should live a little slower, but everyone’s dying off—everyone is off to the next great adventure and I’m here on the floor. OF course When you say it like that you sound suicidal. But there’s no jealousy around it, just curiosity. Is it really just like sleeping? Should I then sleep less since I’ll soon enough be asleep forever? But I like the feeling of waking up. Though to wake up on the floor feels like I woke up in the ground. And I really can’t handle that yet. I mean, that sort of thing is impossible to avoid, I guess. But I don’t want to feel it yet. There’s a lot of life in me that I still need to live. I just don’t know how to live, I guess. And maybe I’ll learn with these mistakes—

But this morning. This morning. No one puked last night. No one got hurt. We all stayed here. And we left the window open, but it’s not cold. The birds are chirping. It’s beautiful outside. The sun is out. The sun is shinning and the rays are hitting my skin and my friends are awake around me and we’re all so quiet even though we’re all awake but we’re not ashamed of anything— we’re so quiet because we just feel so alive—and so real, so oddly real. And the T.V. is squeaking and the cats are walking around us and over us but they’re careful and their paws feel soothing against my oddly soft skin even though it’s using my leg as a jump off point—a jump off and out of the open window. Maybe we should all get up. Maybe we should all jump out and feel the sun and feel oddly alive and breath the air and know we’re all somehow feeling the same strange ok feeling even though we do the same thing every weekend and we don’t get anywhere with it, we just wake up on the floor and feel—feeling connected. Separate people all connected by this weird feeling that we’re all going to be okay. Maybe we shouldn’t keep sleeping on the floor, maybe we should get up and do something or at least get up and lie down in the grass and feel that it’s kind of itchy but mostly warm and that’s the way life is—sort of itchy but mostly warm and no wild Friday night can change how itchy you feel, but it blots out when you get to feel warm. Maybe we’d feel this weird okay more often if we would just be okay with feeling itchy, because sometimes you’re supposed to feel itchy. Sometimes you need to feel so itchy you need to scratch at your skin, but, for now, we’re okay just being okay.