Plus One

17: Catching fireflies

17: Catching fireflies

To say I didn’t sleep that night would’ve been an understatement.

Following the film with my roommates, the usual city fog had surrendered to a steady, rhythmic rain—a faint drum roll escalating toward the climactic clap of thunder that never came. Sleeplessness is easy in the rain. Hours are stolen by runaway raindrops, and boredom melts with languid submission into sparkling puddles. The rustle of sheets, the desperate moan of an old mattress, the ticking of a clock, the indications of being alone—all of them seem to drift away under the liquid bombardment of a storm. Were the mild burst of bad weather to accompany me throughout the sleepless night, I may never have noticed the rest I was missing. To be lost in the melodies of rain, to be caressed by the unique chill that it breathes into the air, varies only slightly from sleep itself.

Therefore, as one could imagine, I was only made aware of my restlessness when the storm whistled away, leaving a damp and wishful memory in its wake. Silence isn’t the obnoxious pest that rebellious teenagers cling to in their attempts to sneak away, and it isn’t the gut-wrenching absence of noise that plagues the moments before something important—the results of a medical test, or the fear that follows a romantic’s first “I love you.” Silence is searching for sound and not finding it; it’s straining your ears beyond average limits, surrendering sight and touch and smell in the hopes of hearing a howl of wind or a shout from the street, but receiving nothing. My world was silent during those hours, and because the loneliness it caused would only be cured by what I couldn’t hear, I was doomed to face the night on my own.

I was relieved by one lapse of conversation—a whispered exchange of words from the adjacent room, made audible only by my desperation. Whether Dominic had spent the beginning of the night in a state similar to mine or not, I couldn’t say, but he was awake at what I decided was three in the morning. From the blond’s careful movements beside him or from the odd peculiarities of sleep, Taylor had apparently awoken too.

“Dom?”

“Everything okay? Did I wake you up?”

“Yeah. I mean, no. No you didn’t. I’m fine.”

“Are you uncomfortable? Do you want me to—?”

“No, no stop. You’re warm. Stay here. Don’t move away. Please, never move away…”

I frequently overheard, whether by being nosy or by genuine accident, tidbits of conversation between the couple like this. More often than not they discussed nothing at all, but in their lack of substance they offered a world of insight. The strange, fleeting bursts of enlightenment I gained from the exchanges were terrible in that I rarely remembered what they were. They seemed like fireflies—piercing darkness with bright light, flashing their presence, compelling you to reach out and snatch them from their majestic dances across the sky; but when you opened your palms, there was nothing there, and you looked up to see that the lightning bug was already long gone.

Never move away, Taylor had begged. But he wasn’t speaking simply about their sleeping positions, or even about his fear of the relationship ripping apart at the seams. Undoubtedly, there was more. I believed it entirely, and for a moment thought I knew exactly what the artist meant, but then the knowledge was lost, the firefly halfway across the field. I sighed, and flipped over on my bed.

Three thirty. Four. Five. Six—and sound came back to me far too late. I listened, exhausted and alert, to tires passing over still-wet pavement. I heard footsteps on the sidewalk outside, plastic stroller wheels combating the cracks of concrete. Someone laughed; a car honked; I rolled out of bed. A night never seems longer than it does to those who can’t find sleep, and so I moved slowly around my room as I tried to convince my body that it remembered how to function. I had the intention of taking a shower—really, I did—but on my way, a familiar tuft of golden hair caught my eye.