f is for fiction

Disclaimer: this is fiction. It's for a class that I have in two hours. I wrote it this morning during a particularly boring stretch of an editing lecture.

***

I've been trying to join all my letters to make words. I've been pulling my words together, shuffling them around on a page, all night long, until something makes sense. I lit some vanilla-scented candles and opened a bottle of merlot, for inspiration.

I am the most tired I've ever been in my whole life. The tiredness is mounting on itself, night after sleepless night, a growing monster. I could curl up inside its yawning mouth.

You keep watching me from across the room. We need to get rid of this open-concept apartment. Why are we living in a bachelor pad when neither of us is a bachelor? My shuffling around and constant wakefulness make you sleep lighter than usual. When I force myself to lie down for a while, I always stir you from sleep. I can't slip into bed quietly enough.

So we both lie awake, and you don't really talk to me and exhausted as I am, I can't sleep. There is too much to think about in the middle of the night.

Dawn breaks after the sixth night, and I gather my papers -- my countless letters and words, all settled into a decided order -- into a binding and put myself on the bus. I think about you watching me in the middle of the night, not speaking. I think about your wordlessness.

I rely on my legs and feet to carry me to the office building, on my hands and fingers to press the right buttons in the elevator. I give the stack of papers to the receptionist, mumble the editor's name, fumble through my purse for a card. I must look like a complete disaster.

Once I'm back on the bus, I find its unsteady lurches are making my head swim. There's a baby crying somewhere behind me, but it sounds so far away, like it's behind a closed door down the hall. I am staring out the window at a homeless man pushing a shopping cart across cracked pavement. The bus pulls past him and he blurs into my peripheral. As we lurch forward, the rest of the world blurs into my peripheral as well, and then I don't see anything at all.

I miss my stop five times. Each time the bus lurches past my stop, the monster retreats a little. When I finally emerge, eyes open, I find myself pulling the little bell and getting off the bus. I am on the wrong side of town, but I feel better than I ever have before.

"What are you doing, are you busy?" I ask you from a pay phone. "Let's do something. Let's talk."