Finally. After fighting and checking back all day again and again, the internet seems to be back up and running. Having lived through the rise of wireless internet throughout dorm after dorm, apartment alike, rundown homes, and stealing unprotected networks from the neighbors, I’m used to internet flukes, but it makes them no less annoying.

Anyway, last night I fell asleep early, around ten thirty in my bedroom. At last, after so many late nights, troubled early mornings, serious sleep waiting only until dawn, my body was too worn out to make it, and I crashed hard barely a page into my novel.

3:37 am

I remember the time because I awoke staring at the clock. My eyes were half open. I couldn’t be sure I was even awake until I’d forced my mind to clear in order to process the time.

3:38 am,

it now read, the glowing red bars adding to the seven in a flicker. Still half asleep, I rolled over slowly, facing my door. My bedroom was pitch dark, eyes either struggling to adjust or failing altogether. My blinds were closed, keeping away just enough of the streetlamp glow.

I heard it. The door, squealing open, singing out against the dark. Passing the halfway point, it went silent, gliding along on better greased hinges as it always did when I’d opened it.

A moment. Two. Absolutely still.

No light in the hallway either. I don’t expect I’d have seen my hand in front of my face, the blackness was so thick. My brain was too fuzzy to consider the options, my heart reacting in the way my brain refused.

The wind. Suction from the open window.

My brain did not respond, did not throw back a retort about the lack of sound of the blinds clacking against each other as they would in such a gust, or the necessity of the front door having to open at the same time to change the pressure and suck my door against its frame.

But then the squealing again. Obviously the door was now closing, taking its sweet time. The part that sent the chills was when I heard the knob turn, reaching its end like racking the slide on a weapon, the way they do in movies. The latch sliding into place sounded like a bullet sliding home.

And then again, stillness. Full quiet. My brain did not speak. My mind did run with thoughts, fear-ridden and coated in that spellbinding phobia, the back-and-forth, the shadow and the glow of the afternoon sun, no argument about cause, about rationale, about a presence felt or unfelt in the shadows of the room; Monster. Stranger. Something else.

True, my skin crawled, but my heart rate resumed, and I fell back against the sheets, curling up, pressing it from my mind.

“There’s a fully natural explanation,” I mumbled, staring sightlessly at the wall next to my bed. Denial didn’t keep me facing the dark. “I’m just too tired to think… to think right now.”

And somehow I managed to drift to sleep again.

*

Daylight. With it reason and only the fuzzy memory of something waking me, a door opening, the clock, forcing myself back to bed. In the light, the suspense of the night is discarded, forgotten, become the stuff of dreams. Childhood past, passed, behind me, brought back by my grief, loneliness, my childhood creative back on again and into overdrive, reality become boogeyman.

In the daylight, it’s painful memory around each corner. It’s lonely.

It’s Daddy knocking on the door to say goodnight and prayers. “Now I lay me down to sleep…” Pauses in between to mark breaks from memory recital, verses. I’d grown up thinking the prayer started, “Nie-a-lay-me.” Some strange syllabic word I’d not yet learned, but recited happily along with my folks.

In the daylight it’s tears, as if to rhyme and parry those matching assaults at night.

Truth be told, I’m getting frustrated. I moved out here to get away from my loss and pain. I moved out here to pick up pieces and get a move on, not to wallow in pity and dig myself into a worser state. I’m discouraged and angry. Blowing small things into proportion, making nothing of something, waxing poetic in a therapy that does little in terms of redirection, redirecting instead to a dark place I don’t want to go, a place I see as only being just two doors down from where I’d just left,

where doors opening slow in the night are only a rhyme and parry to match those assaults of the day.

Shit, I’m losing my mind.