Finding Eden

03

Sleep eluded me ever since I spent the night in the stranger's bed.

You could hardly even call it a bed—it was a makeshift futon he propped up in an empty room. That's the very thing no one tells you when you're living on your own: there's so much room for nothing when you don't have much to account for.

While there were rooms upon rooms (or so it seemed) at the townhouse, I never had enough to occupy all the space so every word I uttered (I didn't speak much at all) travelled through the empty recesses and back to whisper right into my ear. To say it was unsettling would be an understatement.

In my sleepless stupor, I spent my time divided between the company and my studio, rehearsing for Le Corsaire. It took far too much to be a dancer than the rewards were or maybe I just wasn't there yet. While I was a soloist at the company, it was as if I had made it there out of sheer luck and faux passion.

Sometimes I'd pass by the section where my lawn merged into my neighbor's on the way to early pas de deux and I'd wonder if I should go up and ring the bell. What I'd say, I didn't know. And I think we were sort of the same, except every night at 2:00 a.m. he would turn off the lights and shut his windows while I nursed my bruised feet. It was hard to say whether he actually slept when he cut out the lights and if he tumbled around between his covers. He was usually gone early in the morning, diminishing the chances of me ever paying my respects and gratitude.

Eventually my daily grind came to a halt and sputtered to a stop when my ankle rolled the wrong way coming down from relevé. The family physician wrote me a note so I could recuperate but I only tossed it under the pile of CDs and continued doing barre work. When I wasn't doing it, I was composing multiple choreography for numerous songs I dug out of the television drawers. Many of them were masterpieces but only at stringing my heart when certain measures brought back childhood tendencies.

Loneliness came as a hard hit when I found myself tapping my foot to the rhythm of nothing but my pumping heart. I surrendered the hopeless task of recording my thoughts in a journal and threw it across the room. The journal and my sanity slid into a crumpled heap on the floor as the surface of my writing desk was met with some salt and sadness. The simple fact was that the people who leave you don't disappear for long before they become an everyday routine to your life. I hated the way that it almost came as a warning that if I didn't go to bed before the streetlights flickered out, I would be the one that would short circuit.

The simple fact was, they were there with every swig of wine and every wretched word I relayed to the blank pages of my redundant autobiography.

For all the cliché not a day has gone by's, each previous dismissal came back to nip me at my heel because they were absolutely right. Not a day has gone by.

I told my therapist exactly this and she only told me that time would heal as time could mend anything.

Truth was, time didn't care whether I was okay or not and it was all up to me to decide if I should feel better. And as it would, I turned a blind eye and only spun with more fierceness and exactness that would have made my mom proud. But I didn't mind my therapist feeding me the same jargon so I bobbed my head along and told her my progress with my work at the ballet theatre.

"It shouldn't be of me to give advice but would you feel better if you showed your neighbor some welcoming? Get to know him?"

Delilah had blue earrings on that day, matching her carpet. My therapist had an assortment of earrings, often in the same hues that she designed her apartment in.

"Maybe," I only said in response.

That's how I found myself knocking on his door at 7:15 p.m. with a plate of chicken casserole in my hand.

He answered, cheeks tinged and hair a mess, a few moments later. Ever perceptive as he was, his champagne-hued eyes searched my face and dropped to my casserole. Before I could conjure a greeting, he ran a hand through his hand and studied the skin beneath my eyes, still leaning off the door. I noticed the small skid mark it made from the other day against the wall beside the doorbell.

There then existed the break in silence:

"Jesus fuck when's the last time you've had some rest?"