Late at Night

Late at night I’m listening to music. I’m not writing. I’m not reading. I’m not searching authors and literary awards. I’m not thinking about how to approach my next story—what story should be told, what it means to me, why it matters.

I’m listening to music. The oldest of the music that changed me forever, made me want to cling for dear life to whatever I knew, whatever I had at the time to understand why the life I live would mean something to myself and others who would share my oxygen.

I went two years without listening to music. The sound of it, the sound—sound—hurt too much. That thing that I had learned for decades how to channel. Sound being more than what ears hear, but what minds crave. When my mind, because of music, escaped me, sound began to destroy me. Not music, but sound all by itself begging to be organized into something that could speak.

And now that I write, sound is all I can form into sentences. Words have started to escape me yet hold me hostage. I wanted words to free me and now all I can write is harmony. What does it sound like, is all I can ask when I write a sentence. What does it sound like?

I remember when sound eviscerated me, scraped my insides down to only blood vessels, no organs to pump my blood. Sound made me weak—more than weak: skeletal. I was defeated, humiliated, dehumanized by what I had for years waged war against and conquered.

Now—right now—and also the now of so many nights past, I yearn, sacrifice on the altar for my ability to hear the words that form in my skeletal psyche. I gain all control then lose it over and over again when a sound sizzles and steams above my consciousness. It doesn’t need me anymore; it waits for me to come to it, slows down for me to catch it, reach for it, slam it down under my palms and stomp it under my feet.

And I do. I do trample it. I shatter it into shards reflecting slices of myself sharp on every edge, prickling my skin at the touch of them with barely visible sprinkles of blood where the callouses on my hands once formed.

Words are for speaking. I’m tired of hearing my own voice. Late at night, I want to sit still. I want to listen.

———LINES———

I wonder what it would be like, or would have been like, to actually write my own music. When I started transcribing, it was like my ears were hearing for the first time. Music actually started feeling familiar, like I knew what it was, like I knew who it was. The piano made sounds that extended from me rather than by me. But my mind was weird at that time, so I didn’t really think it was me. It didn’t make sense that as my mind was slipping from under my control, music started to finally sound like something. That time was so frantic, so blurry that I have a hard time remembering it. In fact, I don’t remember it. It seemed my mind required instability for the ability to hear what wasn’t heard and then create lines out of it.

That’s where my talent lies. I can see lines. I can hear lines. I can write lines. I know where the lines are. I know how to trace them, how to stay in them, how to stay out of them. Not so much how to cross them. If I ever figure out what I’m going to do with my life, then sure, I might know how to cross those lines. Sometimes this fills me with great anxiety, eviscerates any sense of self-worth I might pretend to have, puts me in a place of nothing emptiness. But sometimes I see that emptiness around me, too.

Because I talk to friends, ever so dear ones, who have their degrees, their lives, their apartments, adult bills, adult concerns and adult relationships with their parents to which I’ve never experienced, and I can see in their eyes that they are just so lost. I can hear in their voice that they have said so few self-defining statements, have had so few conversations about who they are and why they are who they want to be, or how they know they aren’t becoming who they won’t want to be years from now.

It’s just Jesus, I would want to say. But it wasn’t really. I haven’t quite understood that whole Jesus shift. All I know as of now is that reading the bible fills me with a most pure, potent, gripping, intoxicating, gut-wrenching joy, clarity, and fulfillment. There’s a God, alright. I just don’t know if that God is Jesus, if Jesus is what fills that void I know awaits every time I want to reject that spiritual power.

It’s the power that rejected me for so long. The white was too white for me, the proper too proper for me, the correctness too correct for me, so all I knew how to do was put it on like an outfit, or maybe a uniform, and perform it until it seeped through my clothes and into my skin. It worked, I’m pretty sure, because I just wanted to be good. It never had to do with a life eternal thing. I just wanted to be good, is all. Nothing more, but the nothing less is what tended to cripple me.

Because I was alone. I didn’t know very well how to sit in two worlds, one perfect and one more than imperfect. If it weren’t all crystal-blue-beach-water beautiful, I had to remove myself from it. So of course it came to a head one fateful day as everything phenomenal always does; it didn’t happen over time, slowly, progressing steadily and evenly.

I sat in a room with two people I knew and loved, and a few other people I had hardly spoken with. They were watching a comedy video of Martin Lawrence, who I never even thought of as funny in any way, and he was filthy. He was filthy and the people, including myself, were filthy just sitting there watching it. The things he said made me cringe.

But I wouldn’t leave. I had done that already many times and when I left, I had nowhere significant to go and no one in particular to switch out my surroundings with; I would merely be alone. I’d leave a room or table filled with people and notice I was alone. And being alone turned into the heaving and sobbing crying fits that only intensified into loneliness.

When I sat in that room projected with Martin Lawrence, the two people I knew and loved loved me back. He asked me why I was still there and she looked on with concern. He knew the material was unsuitable for me and it inflicted his own soul to see me experiencing it. It’s something I was used to—people who want to guard my innocence and purity even while they trash what innocence they have left, which everyone, I believe, still has and always has, even just a little bit, even if they try to destroy it.

The other one would have left, he told me. The other one who does the same Jesus thing that I do, the other one who wasn’t there because he was somewhere across the world trying to convince people to do the same Jesus thing that we both do. The other one who I knew because he had grown up in Atlanta with me—I knew he would have left. And if he were there with me, I would have left to ensure that I performed correctly in his sight, not just to avoid the judgement, but to also be a part of it, to be emboldened by the reality that humor didn’t need to be objectifying and dehumanizing, to enjoy the power of being able to walk away from all of what was cool in that moment and know that it took strength to be odd.

But he wasn’t there. I was there alone, as I almost always am, and if I left, I would have to be alone on top of being alone, which would only amount to loneliness. And then its most severe case would show symptoms of progression, but that happens later. Right then, I stayed. I watched. I shrunk inside, then withered and trembled at the grotesqueness of a world too vast for me. But I wasn’t alone in that world. In that world, I was surrounded by people. I figured I’d rather decompose with everyone else than live eternally by myself.

I didn’t make a decision for death and destruction that day. I made a decision to not be alone. I made a decision to not spend yet another Friday and Saturday, and probably Sunday night in a very quiet and scarcely populated building. I decided not to cry alone anymore. I decided to be a part of all the weakening stuff that I was supposed to be stronger for not partaking in. I decided to believe my loneliness. I didn’t cross the line that day. One moment I was inside, the next, out.

That’s how I learned about lines. I learned how to trace them in my spirit and now I get stuck tracing them with my eyes. The lines of decency, of safety, of respectability and especially the lines of sanctity. I look for simple things to trace: the outline of bubble text or the shape of an eye. The eye; the first time I watched pornography was the summer between 4th and 5th grade.

I spent that summer in Chicago with my grandmother and she had cable, which I never had at home, and a television in a room where I could watch it all by myself, another something I never had at home. I was only flipping through channels and there it was. Two extremely blond women (I say extremely blond because they were blonder than I knew blond could be) sitting at a pool topless and kissing and performing fellatio and it stopped me in my tracks. I didn’t turn the channel soon enough. I hadn’t learned how to leave ih–mee-dee–eht–lee, the way I’d leave in college when someone interested in taunting me would simply say the word “vagina” out of nowhere just so they could laugh as I got up and left.

I bitterly wept. I prayed and prayed and prayed that night, pleading, begging, groveling for God to forgive me. I made a promise.

“I’ll never watch pornography again,” I told him, “if only you will forgive me”.

And more than forgiveness, I needed to feel better. I needed him to disinfect the bacteria forming inside of my mind, rotting me from the inside to where I could smell my own shriveled neurons.

After I prayed, if I didn’t feel better, than I prayed again. Over and over I did that through the night until my tears washed all the strength out of my eyelids. But even then, I knew I wasn’t, couldn’t be as bad as those visuals made me feel. I sort of knew that it happened to me more than me doing it because I never had control over my body’s response, the tingling at such a young, unknowing age, something I never knew or could explain until two decades later.

I didn’t end up outside of the lines that night. I definitely didn’t cross the line because to languish as I did wouldn’t have been possible on the border. But I did sense the line, conceptualizing for the first time that lines existed more profoundly than I thought was possible.

Not feeling entirely accountable for that night kind of pushed it out of my mind. The line faded to dots tiny enough to escape visibility, leaving my eyes once again sensitive to the worst of things. Thanks to my bubble, my cloud of Mormonism, I never had to behold the worst of things until college. Not until I got to the city of New York—where even the Mormons were entirely superficial and openly rebellious—was my bubble pin-pricked. Just a needle, air escaping in infinitesimal molecules. And it wasn’t just college, but also church that leaked. Going to church in that city where spiritual purity is a liability broke down what I had been raised to understand my identity should be. I finally saw something that challenged its perfection.

Because to me, it was perfect. All of it. If I had to check off the boxes of righteousness just to enter a Mormon temple, then that meant it had to be perfect just as I had to be perfect. Moving to NY and no longer seeing that standard of expectation made the loneliness itch, for if the foundation of perfection wasn’t real, then my loneliness wasn’t real either.

“I don’t have to leave anymore,” I told myself when Martin Lawrence traded “vagina” for “pussy”. “I don’t have to be lonely anymore. It’s not real.”

The beginning was exciting: getting to the city that I had visited a handful of times while my brother was at The New School’s Mannes School of Music playing jazz–the place where every time I visited, I only thought to myself that my brother would die there, that no one could survive living in that city. But it didn’t scare me when I went myself. The real music training was to begin, and the real survival depended on it. There was nothing to be afraid of because I saw the lines, was contained by them—made safe by them. I didn’t know how to cross the lines and I didn’t want to.

The summary, the moral of the story, the conclusion of the whole matter was the line between being alone and being lonely–not the bible conclusion when King Solomon says that, “…the conclusion of the whole matter [is]: Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man.”

I didn’t know until ten years after college that King Solomon’s conclusion was the line between sanity and insanity. I didn’t know that I had crossed the line the night I stayed, the night I remained in the most uncomfortable space I’d ever been in. I didn’t know that the conflict between my brain and my mind had begun in a way that I had the wisdom at 9-years-old to prevent.

The lines at 19-years-old trained my eyes and then guided my eyes, outlining only loneliness.

My brother died at home. “Even home isn’t safe,” I thought.