Aerial

The Double Encore

"Ow? Jesus fuck."

Something about the sensation of pain dead in the center of night, halfway between sunset and sunrise, gives it a grisly romantic quality. Robbery at knifepoint, alarming self-realizations, spine-racking sobs, ghostly hauntings and demonic possessions, the onset of stomach viruses, desperate confessions of love, existential dread below the break of an ocean wave, black-and-white dreams and colorful nightmares.

They all seem to occur somewhere after the dark and before the light.

It wasn't so much that Harry couldn't fall asleep last night but rather, stay asleep. Actually, it was one of those nights where he crashed out hard and fast, his stomach stuffed with his favorite snacks and a splash of orange juice mixed with Murky Lagoon. He'd almost passed out midway through his routine nightly journaling session, a relatively recent and now-essential habit that he'd established two years ago, when he no longer had the comfort of your tits to ramble into as he murmured himself to sleep.

Much like a toddler, Harry fought being pulled into unconsciousness last night until it was no longer in his control. Physically holding his burning eyelids open at one point and chain-smoking three more Crush cigarettes before his pen reached the end of the last pink-tipped page.

Harry has fond memories of journaling and scribbling blackout poetry in several corners of the world. Inside of The Pink for the last time, on a beach in Oaxaca just after a long surfing session that ended at eight in the morning. On a crowded, smoke-filled airplane that hovered somewhere over the Pacific Ocean, in a shaded hammock strung between two palms in Oahu, on the mattress on the floor of his bedroom in London before the new bed frame had been delivered. Coming down off of a mushroom trip in Phuket, poking away at an omelet and rice between drags of his pink cigarette, distracted by the orange rising sun.

And notably, the morning after he woke up in New York with you two weeks ago, his heart bleeding out onto the page as you applied lipstick in the vanity mirror in preparation for your interview with The Times. "I Can't Stand the Rain" by Ann Peebles crackled through the radio speaker, guiding his pencil as he shaded in the corner of your lip in a newspaper margin beside six strategically blocked-out words.

her legs wrapped around
                  my
              love

And just like clockwork, for the third sleep in a row now, Harry shot up at four A.M. with a red static buzz between his ears and his heart pounding out of his chest. No whispers of dreams lingering, no sounds aside from the hum of this new hotel room's fan and his heavy breathing. The sheets damp and clingy from his sweat. The dim light from the bathroom flooding out onto the floor and staining a slice of lemon meringue pie on the soft carpet in the hallway, beckoning him to follow the path through the darkness until he was squinting against the white harsh lightbulbs.

It must have something to do with the fact that tomorrow is coming in hot. And there's nothing that Harry hates more than a looming ultimatum in which the outcome is completely out of his control.

A deadline.

And if I don't?

Then you can kiss your precious partner goodbye.

Harry sucks his sore thumb into his mouth and then shakes his hand out a bit, squinting in the halogen lighting of the bathroom to see the misshapen red mark burned into his skin. A pair of slim-fitting gray joggers are cinched at his waist by the drawstring, leaving him bare everywhere else, and rendering him that much more vulnerable to being burned by an open flame.

Holding the sewing needle between his teeth, he runs his thumb under cool tap water for a moment before trying again. With the scrape of another match on flint and a flash of yellow that flickers across his face, Harry carefully heats the needle and then drops the match into the sink to take its final breath of oxygen. And before he can convince himself otherwise, he leans forward and peers into his own eyes, then plunges the hot metal straight through the lobe of his ear. A singe of pain runs up his spine and forces him to clench his teeth. His stomach tosses a bit. The surge of adrenaline promises that he won't be going back to sleep anytime soon.