A Different Kind Of Heaven

The air conditioning system is quiet for its age, and the only light in the room comes from the television bolted to the wall. The channel it’s on has long since signed off, and the crackle of static is all but left. There’s an empty beer bottle, an ice bucket, a small ashtray with a couple of butts, and an empty glass sitting on a silver tray beside the bed. Surreal. Very.

My back is killing me as it usually does nowadays, and I’m too damned poor and chickensh*t to seek treatment. There are days that I find it unbearable to sit or walk, but that’s just part of the chocolate chute screw we get for being people. The pressure of her leg as it drapes over my back is welcome pain, and a smile dawns on my tired face. How long has it been? Almost four years to this day I reckon. I still tear myself up thousand different ways when she’s near me. Now she’s here, finally. After all this time, she’s here. She went to where I was, without knowing the way. She found me, in her unerring sense of the true north. She tosses again, complaining about her inability to go back to sleep after I disturbed her slumber a few minutes ago. I have all these queries and probably no tomorrow. Of course I’d bother her.

“Let’s take it one day at a time. I am here, will be here, only because I want to.” She said that in the most offhand and confident of manners that I choked despite myself. True, it’s her choice to make, and I am but a fortunate spectator in the events unfolding before me. Makes me wonder where this will lead. I’m scared out of my wits, but can’t and won’t tear my eyes off. I’m way out of my league and sinking fast. Happily drowning just to be perfectly clear. With my bad heart to boot, I know I’m treading on eggshells.

“If you want me, then you have me. I say when it stops. After all, I’m the one with everything to lose.” She threw that out casually too. Made me shudder at the strength of character of a woman who says that to your face. I, in my usual stupidity as a human male, thought the statement to be purely physical in nature. The fact that we’re still clothed dispels that. I’m such a dumb*ss. She is here though, no mistake about it. That we’re snuggling, is more than I had ever dreamed of. I was running my fingers through her hair moments earlier, breathing her intoxicating scent. This is way better than what my Neolithic self had predicted earlier.

If you ask me if I knew her reasons, or maybe had inkling as to her intentions, I think I’d shrug and scratch my head. That’s why I’m committing these thoughts to words, in the hope of finding a rhyme or reason. It’s been elusive so far. I gave up the ghost already, accepted that I was beating a dead horse, and that it’s what my friend told me a couple of years ago. She was to be my “ungettable get” as she so succinctly pointed out. To find myself with her in these early morning hours that I hold dear is well, confusing to put it lightly. Maybe the earth has fallen off its axis sometime during the month.

I have Billy Corgan steadily droning as I type this, his melancholy and anguish a perfect companion in this forced separation. I try and ram my head against a wall and feel blinding pain. Stars flutter in the expanse of darkness and I’m sure I’m awake. Is this what the person who coined the term “intertwined souls” meant? So this is a different kind of heaven. Fate help me, I know I will never be able to let it go.