"In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three a.m., day after day."
~ F. Scott Fitzgerald
Three a.m. jolts the body and mind awake, electric, like a live wire firing with nerves. I take a few deep breaths and try to remind myself that I am safe, knowing this to be untrue. As an unknown melody flows through the firing synapses of my brain, I count backwards from twenty, wondering where my cigarettes are.
Turning my head in the black night, I make out the figure of my bed mate who lies curled up and dead to the night air. Her name is Stardust, though I suspect that is not her real name. She is a 'dancer' at Jumbo's Clown Room, a joint I frequent when I need to get out of my apartment and out of my head. We struck up a friendship over the course of my nights slumped over her booze stained bar stools. Eventually, our conversations led to drinks and other treats resulting in an openness that I haven't shared with anyone in quite sometime...maybe ever.
Our late night talk sessions led us to the bedroom, on occasion, where we would try our best to satisfy one another physically and try to ignore the fact that we so desperately longed for genuine connection. Last night, she fed me cocaine from her fingernail as she chuckled saying that I was one of the funniest people she had ever met. Oh Stardust...you legend...I appreciate the effort anyhow.
The melody circulating my mind waves grows louder and I decide to seize inspiration. I grab a beer from the fridge and search Stardust's pockets the the last of her baggie. Just enough. I take it over to my desk and light up a smoke as I chop down a quick bump and swig my beer. Pulling out my notebook, I jot down a few bars and some of the lyrics flowing through me. The combination of the beer, cocaine and nicotine set me straight on and I begin to write furiously.
Before I know it, an hour has passed. The darkness of the room begins to ease as I realize that I've written a new song. I sit back, slightly satisfied and take a pull from my beer. As I read over my lyrics, I see that my song is about the quiet chaos of anxious reflection. It pins me to my chair as my gaze searches the room around me.
Stardust sleeps comfortably in my bed, slightly snoring. This girl...man...such character, such presence. It's baffling to me how she can still convey that through the darkness of her life. She wasn't some cliche mid-western girl that moved to the City of Angels to become a 'star'. She was just a girl from East Los Angeles, who grew up poor in a family that didn't love her. At the age of eighteen she was raped...by a drunken neanderthal that laughed at her afterwards as she lay curled, crying, in a pool of shame. At twenty one, she aborted a fetus that she secretly wanted to keep because the other half responsible said he would leave her if she didn't. He did anyway...a month after.
She's just a girl, trying each day to find a way to smile. She's just a girl, clinging to a hope that was never promised her. She's just a girl, trying to find someone to love her...that part of her that no one ever sees. She's just a girl, somewhere in between, these city streets of broken dreams and the dying hope of those golden shores of heaven. She's just a girl, broken...and battered...and bruised...and a part of me loves her for that.
I take out a cigarette and light it. The smoke glimmers and fades across the peaking daybreak of tomorrow. I can almost feel the gentle clash of the dawning daylight against the steely cold, lonely darkness engulfing the room. In my mind's eye, Stardust rises and looks to me. She whispers the words '...this too...shall pass...' and smiles coyly before evaporating into the lingering haze of my smoke cloud.
Two lost souls, passing one another and trying to hold on to lifeline limbs in this swirling, chaotic mess. Looking over her, I am filled with the sudden desire to hold her...to crawl inside of her and die for a moment...because I am her. Just as she is me. The way we are all one another, unsure and uncertain, beaten and broken, confused and enlightened, defeated yet hopeful...floating uncontrollably, arms outstretched in desperation, down these filthy, sullen streets.
My heart yearns to wipe the memory stained teardrops from her past. To wash away all of the hurt, her pain and her longing. I have a pleasant fantasy that maybe she's lying there, dreaming of doing the same to me...far away on those golden shores where we fly upwards smiling into that great eternal netherworld. A place where she could crawl inside of me and die for a moment and the indescribable feeling of comfort I give her makes our singular souls burst into rays of miraculous moonbeams. A place where by the sheer glow of her frail skin she would be made pure...and tell me to simply take her hand and not to be afraid anymore...there's hope yet...
I know that this new dawning day before me, filling up the night of my lair, will soon be no longer. I know that someday ashes will turn to ashes and the dust of these forlorn memories will scatter infinitely into that ethereal wanderlust where time has no second hand. I know that someday, children will no longer cry to the world they cannot understand and the sounds of their laughter will banish the burning barriers of those pearly gates. I know that someday we will all fall to our knees and weep at the knowledge of all existence and the purity of our passions.
And I know that Stardust is right....this too...shall pass.
But until that day...
.... I know...that I'm somewhere in between...the gripping darkness of reality...and the healing light of a dream...