“What's the point?" Rebecca sighed, pulling his hand from between her thighs.
"What do you mean, what's the point?"
"I mean, why even get started. We both know exactly where it's going to end up."
"So, what do you expect me to do?"
"I dunno, it's just boring for me; that's all. Same thing every time. Besides, I'm really into this book at the moment."
"Jesus, Becky!" She hated it when he called her that. "I'm sorry that I bore you so much, but..."
Miles stopped talking. He'd learned long ago to choose his battles. Besides, he'd already established how he felt and was aware that she didn't care, and probably pissed her off by calling her Becky. If he stopped talking now and accepted defeat, she might give into a pity fuck. But she didn't, she just went back to her book and Miles rolled over and tried to ignore the buzzing crescendo coming from somewhere.
"What the fuck is that noise?" he yelled through his teeth.
"It's probably your heart."
"What!?"
"It's probably your heart," she repeated flatly.
And for some reason Rebecca's answer angered him more than it reasonably should have.
Miles's mouth ached and the buzz kept growing, but it didn't bother him nearly as much as what Rebecca said about his heart.
What the hell does that even mean, he thought to himself, as confusion gave way to the clarity of consciousness. Miles rolled over and reached for the alarm clock and hit the snooze.
~
Miles still set an alarm. Not that he had anywhere to be, he just didn't want to waste the day sleeping. And he didn't sleep well, yet. His bed was nothing more than a mattress on the ground and a few blankets. The curtains he had bought upon arriving in ____ were still wrapped in cellophane, so there was nothing to stop the blinding white sun from waking him. But the sun wasn't up just yet.
Yesterday, for a reason he couldn't seem to justify to anyone but himself, Miles moved to ____. He and Rebecca were on an indefinite break, but it wasn't because of that alone that he left. Something was missing and he felt that his life had become stagnant. The job he had was nothing special, or at least nothing to stick around for. Most of his friends had moved away, or moved on from the lives they once shared with him.
And although he couldn't be sure of the causes, the symptoms were clear. There was something missing. The spark he could remember feeling for life was gone, and had been gone for some time now. He couldn't pinpoint the precise moment it happened. It was as if it were a black mold growing under the surface of his life. It was the breakup with Rebecca that caused him to see it, but it wasn't her fault. It wasn't anyone's fault, he thought.
He could remember a time before the spark left him, before his life had dulled. Back when he was 19 or 20, and his friends still lived in town. None of them had steady jobs, and yet, somehow, they always had access to money and a car. They would take long drives at night out to the deserted country roads and drink MD2020. They would crash house parties and steal booze and cigarettes when no one was looking. They would go out on dates with girls they hardly knew, laugh and drink and pass out in rented rooms. There was a spark then. But college funds and student loans dry up, parents cut you off from cars, bank accounts and cell phone plans. But even then, there was a spark. In the daily ritual of twisting out the stale remnants of ancient cigarette butts, there was still a spark. So Miles knew it wasn't the money or the comfort that his middle class upbringing afforded him that had made him happy. No, it was something else. Then, somewhere between 20 and 25, it left him.
So one night, while lying in bed, he decided to go looking for it. He thought for a moment of moving to Chicago with his best friend Jim, but things were different for both of them now. Miles didn't wish to relive the experiences he had had with Jim and he knew Jim wasn't interested either. Staying out all night drinking coffee or liquor, or both, until sunrise, running from cops or security guards--no, neither of them were interested in that any more. Besides, Jim had really gotten his shit together since moving away. Middle management in a factory, 35 grand a year salary, holiday pay, full health benefits, an office and business cards with his name and title printed on them. They were still great friends, but both of them knew there was no going back to what they had had. And Miles was OK with that, he thought that night while he lay in bed and decided to start over. He wasn't interested in those things any more; it seemed as if he wasn't interested in anything any more.
As he lay in bed that night, Miles thought hard about the last time he was interested and the last place he found interesting. He and Jim had been up all night again, driving without destination, when they found it. And something about the place told him 'someday'.
~
Miles turned the alarm off. He was scatter-brained, as he always was early in the morning when he had the luxury of lying in bed for a moment. He was also upset over what Rebecca had said about his heart, not yet realizing it was a dream. One by one his senses slipped into place. Blurry vision cleared up, the white noise that hung in the room became unnoticeable, his mouth suddenly tasted stale and dry, and he felt heavy and his back ached. Miles breathed deeply, smelled nothing but didn't notice, and let his mind wander.
I hardly even remember the move.
Arg, my fucking jaw!
The Violent Femmes were wrong, breaking up isn't easy at all.
It was a lot harder than the move, at least.
I don't even remember it, really, but here I am.
I already miss the sex. It wasn't even that good.
Maybe it has something to do with intimacy, not orgasms.
I wonder how she's doing.
I really should put up some curtains.
Ow, my fucking jaw!
His anger was subsiding as he realized he had done it again and Miles laughed to himself. Recently, over the past few months, he'd been having dreams in which he felt a very strong emotion during the dream that carried over into when he woke up. Miles found this very amusing. He was laughing hysterically now, stretching his jaw at the same time. When the dreams were happy, Miles would wake himself up by laughing and his face would be sore from smiling all night. When the dreams were angry, he woke up with a locked jaw and clenched fists. And then there were the dreams from which he woke curled around the pillow, shaking. Those dreams left him feeling embarrassed, but he still found the absurdity of it hilarious.
Miles rolled off the bed and onto the floor and immediately felt something wet under him. Pushing himself up onto his hands and knees, Miles looked down at the blue plastic cup lying on its side where he had just rolled. Miles chuckled to himself. He and Rebecca had had a cat who liked to knock over all their cups, and since he moved, and she kept the cat, he thought he didn't have to worry about keeping full glasses of water sitting around any more.
The apartment was weird, he thought, as he walked into the living room to survey it in the dim twilight of not quite morning. It didn't have a smell, which he also thought was strange. Miles thought instantly about how when he was a child, he noticed how all his friend's houses smelled very distinctly different. And when he was away at summer camp for a week each summer, he would come home and notice the distinct smell of his own home. Now this was his home, he told himself, and it didn't smell like anything. That kind of bothered him.
"I should get some candles or incense," Miles said to the empty room.
It was then that Miles noticed a beep coming from his cell phone. Reaching into his pocket, Miles already knew who it was from. He and Jim couldn't help but play phone tag. It stemmed from the fact that Miles was a second-shifter while Jim was a first-shifter. They would argue about the finer points of each camp, as if there was something to be won. And just as brutally, and verbally violent, they would both defend themselves and mock the other for the life choices he had made. Miles's confidence in his ideals was waning now, as he had seemingly given up everything he had fought for and was now looking for something new to protect. But they were best friends, so when he listened to the voicemail Jim left him about "finally seeing what I was talking about," and cleverly put "I told you so"s, Miles was not offended. Maybe Jim was right.
Stepping down the stairs of his front porch, Miles couldn't think of anything else. Maybe Jim was right. He walked to the side of the large 2-story green house and unlocked his bike from the metal electrical pipe that ran to the upstairs apartments. It was a beautiful fall day. It was the kind of weather that deserves a jacket but only receives a sweater because the residual heat of summer has still not left the body.
"A perfect day," Miles commented to his bike, although he noted how the usual smell that accompanies autumn mornings like these was missing. Maybe it's just not ready yet, he thought to himself. And partially because of the perfection of the day, Miles took a positive position concerning the issue at hand; what now?
"What to do with my life now?" Miles said as he rode out of his driveway and down the street, towards south-sloping northern hill that lent itself to his neighborhood's namesake. Climbing the hill was work, but he didn't notice. He was too busy thinking. He tried to think towards the future, but he couldn't help letting his mind wander back to his previous life with Rebecca. What had gone wrong? It happened so slowly. And what about his job, and his ambition to better himself? He quit his job because he wasn't happy there, but that action didn't really make him happy either. And with a twisting train of thought that meandered parallel to his bike riding, he found himself both in a neighborhood he didn't recognize as well as at a conclusion. Miles stopped. The word rested on his lips and he spat it out with his tongue.
"Commitment."
In a flash of a second, it all made sense. Rebecca, his job, his lack of new friends, the desperate need to find the spark--they were all caused by his inability to commit to anything new. Even though pretty much every aspect of his life had changed, Miles still held fast to the commitments he made five years prior. It occurred to him that he was always waiting for things to break down and go back to the way they were before, or at least break down into something that resembled what his life used to be. And even though he was no longer that person, he refused to acknowledge it.
Now he could see it. And even though it didn't help him figure out how to change it, it was the moment of realization he needed. It was that moment of realization that almost killed him. From around the blind corner, Miles had no way of seeing the car and the car had no way of seeing him. And while he stood in the street and pondered the word and all its implications, the car pulled around the corner and directly into Miles. He wouldn't later remember the thought of confusion and anger that never formed into a word as he was thrown to the ground. Nor would he remember the yelp that escaped his lips when his head met with the concrete, knocking him unconscious.
~
In fact, he couldn't remember much of anything concerning the morning's events when he woke up in the warm bed in a sterile room. Before his eyes even opened, he noticed the smell. He was in a hospital. There were soft beeps and squeaking steps in the distance, and always that smell. The room was whiter than any room in which he'd ever been. He was light-headed and even more scatter-brained than usual.
"I think he's awake."
Miles recognized the voice immediately. It was Rebecca.
"How are you feeling, sweetie?"
There was a different voice now, his mother's. He couldn't see them; his head was held in place by something. Very aware of his breathing, Miles's mind strained to figure out his new surroundings and his eyes wandered the room. Through a cloud of drugs in his brain, the question came to him.
"What happened?" Miles spoke softly.
"Honey, you were hit by a car early this morning. The police said you were standing in the road and a car came around a corner and hit you. We're so glad you're alive!" his mother, on the verge of tears, told him. She was holding his hand tightly now.
"Where am I?" Miles asked.
"The hospital, honey," his mother answered.
And yet it still didn't make any sense. How did he get from ____ and back home so quickly? And then, in the pain-killer-induced haze, he asked himself where exactly he had moved to, but he couldn't remember.
"Mom, didn't I move yesterday?"
"What?"
"Didn't I move yesterday? Like to another city?"
Miles's mind was black. Memories blinked in and out like a string of Christmas lights, but they didn't add up to anything. Where had he moved to? He couldn't remember the name of the town, or the move at all. The last thing he could remember was the fight he and Rebecca had gotten into before they broke up.
"We had a fight and broke up and I moved away to--to somewhere I can't remember now, but I was alone and... and I don't remember anything else," Miles slurred.
"Miles, what are you talking about? We went to bed together last night, and when I woke up you were gone," Rebecca stated in a confused tone.
Miles furrowed his brow and squinted his eyes, trying to make sense of everything. He heard someone push the door open and enter the room. He felt coolness in his left arm and heard a whir coming from a machine on his left, near his head. The coolness spread up his arm and Miles felt very calm and his mouth tasted metallic. Suddenly, his confusion didn't bother him. Actually, it was kind of funny, he thought as he laughed.
"Well, I see he's awake," a man's voice said, as he cleared his throat. "That's good; the injuries didn't seem too severe, luckily. He should be just fine in a couple of days. But I wanted to talk to you, Mrs. Burke, about something I noticed on his records. Um, I noticed your son has a history of somnambulism, but he hasn't had an episode for some time now."
"Yes, well when he was about 9 he had a couple incidents, but that was so long ago now." his mother replied, cutting the doctor off.
"Miles, do you..."
The doctor stopped talking. Miles's eyes were softly closed and a slight, almost holy, smile began to form on his face. In his last few moments of consciousness Miles breathed calmly and thought about the only thing he could remember from the whole ordeal. He had come to a conclusion, he found an answer, and he was content with that. Now was time to sleep.
