I’ve just been awoken by the needley poke of tiny snowflakes bouncing off the other side of the window in my room. It’s still dark outside and the moon is playing hide-and-seek with the dark snow clouds that are moving across the sky like cars on a freeway.
I lay here and stare at the ceiling for a moment. I know all the specks in it, and I think of all the figures and objects I’ve crafted in my mind from the formations of lines and dots on the soft white tiles. I stare for a long time, longer than usual.
I close my eyes and try to fall back asleep. Sleep is a refuge to me, a temporary reprieve from my life chained to this bed, my hands and feet tied to it with tubes and wires. My body is my prison, but this bed is my torture. I want to arise like Lazarus and tear these strings off my body. I want to feel the pain as they ease out of me. I want to scan my skin and see the blood ooze out of the holes where they’d once been. I want to feel my body again and peer into a mirror, fix my hair up, curl my eyelashes, let a puffy brush tickle my cheeks and powder my face ever so gently.
A shot of moonlight pierces through the window and into my left eye. I want to grab it and feel its brightness. I want to wrap it around my body and wear it. I want to believe that it can take me someplace else. I look down at my right hand, twisted and deformed like a crab claw. I inspect my nails. They’re long and yellowed, with bits of gummy particles under them that no one cares to remove. It disgusts them. They won’t let me grab onto anything except one day at a time.
I take my good hand and move it slowly to the crown of my head, gently tracing the tiny strands of hair that poke out of my scalp, covered in crusty scabs and sores. They’re crooked and dry, like thin, mangled wires, spread far from each other from my monthly dose of chemical cocktails. I open my eyes and begin to dream in the moonlight. I’m with Bobby Trumbull in his ’66 Chevy Camaro, on the beach at Burt Lake, just a mile from the farmhouse. His uneasy hands are caressing my face and I can feel the calluses on his palms. Then he moves his hands up to my hair and they disappear in its thickness. He takes a few large clumps of hair and frames my face with them. He tells me I’m the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen.
The moon is going away now, shifting over the building and out of site, leaving behind a milky light on a perfect slathering of snow that clings to the tree branches and lies silently on the rolling hills outside.