Chapter Two #3
Once Silas’s breathing is deep and even, I know he won’t move again until morning.
His meds may be imperfect, but at least they knock him the fuck out.
Before he spent a lot of time looking like he was asleep, but I don’t think he really was.
It was more like he was powered down, but all those thoughts and anxieties continued to spark through him, exhausting him at a cellular level.
Personally, the amount of sleep I’ve been getting in a quiet house is also something that isn’t as good as it should be. It’s too damn quiet, if you ask me. The whole thing is unsettling.
How are you supposed to sleep if there’s no ambient noise to cover whatever weird sounds creep out in the night?
Because every time I hear so much as a creak in the darkness, my overactive imagination starts painting a picture of an intruder coming towards us.
Or a ghost. Or a gremlin. Or maybe my fucking dad, methed up and looking for money under the mattress.
While part of it is my own unhinged personality, part of it is a finely honed survival instinct, and I don’t think it’s going away any time soon.
I can already tell it’s going to be one of those nights.
My nerves are all still wound tight from work, ready to spark at a moment’s notice, and while a good fuck definitely helps me relax, the intensity of what we did is contributing to my overall tension.
Without making more noise than I have to, I slip out from under the covers. Silas’s hand was on my hip, and there’s a specific moment where I feel the warmth of his fingertips disappear as I drag myself out of his reach. I regret my choice in that instant, but it’s too late to turn back.
Once I’m on my feet, I pull on the same sweats-and-hoody combo from earlier and slip out of the room, closing the door behind me with a faint click.
The heating works in this house thankfully, but it’s still chilly at nighttime, so I also swipe a blanket from the back of the couch that was a housewarming present from my Aunt Jaz.
It has an old-fashioned pattern of horses galloping across the horizon, and it’s so cheesy I should hate it, but I don’t. The fabric is soft and worn, and the little imperfections in her stitching make it feel more human. Like a person is reaching through the material to touch me.
Which is crazy. I still let the concept comfort me as I wrap it around my shoulders and sneak into the kitchen.
There’s a brief moment of panic where I wonder if we’re out of booze. Not tonight. Please not tonight.
It’s not technically too late to go out and buy beer, but I’d have to drive far to find a store that’s open, and I don’t want to risk the chances of Silas waking up to find me gone.
It’s more than that, as well. I don’t really want to be faced with how much time I’ll spend arguing with myself about whether to go or not, weighing the pros and cons, instead of just accepting that we’re out of booze like a normal person.
That feels like something big and looming, pressing up against my mind too close for me to find the edges of it to get a grip.
I’d much rather keep ignoring it for now.
Besides, it’s not like I do this every night. Just some nights. Just when I can’t sleep, and the deathly echoes of this fucking house are crawling into my brain one by one, keeping me awake.
Just to take the edge off.
Everything’s fine, though, because there are still a few Bud Lites tossed in one of the vegetable drawers, as well as a few inches of very questionable whiskey left in the bottle on top of the fridge.
Silas has basically stopped drinking altogether, because he wasn’t really into it before and now it messes with his meds, so except for the rare occasions when my mom is both here and off the wagon, I’m the only one burning through it all.
I grab one can and crack it quietly while standing at the end of the kitchen, as far from the bedroom as I can be. Then I relocate to the sagging maroon couch in the living room, wrap the blanket tighter around my shoulders, and pull out my phone.
Silas won’t wake up. I’m being paranoid by even being this quiet. But the thought of interrupting his sleep even once–especially if he’s going to worry about why I’m not asleep–bugs me too much to risk it.
Once I’m settled, my mind immediately begins to float. I stare at my phone, thumbing between different social media accounts and getting caught up on all the creators I’ve started following whose content I’m really enjoying.
I never used to have time for social media.
I thought it was shallow, and mostly about moms bitching each other out on Facebook or everyone I went to high school with posting cheesy engagement and baby announcements in between complaining about who got put on house arrest and who owes who child support.
Like a lot of things, it turns out I wasn’t looking closely enough. Or maybe I was seeing what I wanted to see.
After me and Silas got settled, I got curious about LGBTQ+…
stuff. I don’t know. If I’m a part of this community, I should know about it, and I don’t want to come across like an asshole that says the wrong thing all the time.
I started out by asking Wish questions, even though it’s not like I lived under a rock before and I’d always tried to be an ally.
Of course, it didn’t take long for me to wear out Wish’s patience.
It turns out I had more questions than I thought.
She told me to stop making her do all the work for me and go find information, so I went.
And I discovered that the internet has more than just porn, if you look in the right places.
And also that the right porn can be informative sometimes…
It took some trial and error, but now I follow a bunch of TikTokers who talk about queer rights issues and social issues in general, and the more I watch, the more it speaks to me.
I always knew I was poor. I always knew I had a raw deal in life and so did most of the people around me. And I was pissed about it. But I think I never realized just how deep all those injustices went in the world, or how deliberate most of them are.
Once I started listening, I couldn’t stop.
It’s addictive. I just wanted to learn about Stonewall and shit so I didn’t seem like a complete waste of space, but now it’s like a switch in my head that I can’t turn off.
And the more I understand about the causes of it all, the more I see the effects of it everywhere.
Unfortunately, that also means I’m getting angrier and angrier with every fucking day that passes. But I can’t do anything about that.
At least it gives me something to think about other than obsessing over the creaks in the house, or stopping myself from going through the trash to see if Silas really ate something, or waking him up to cry and scream and beg him to promise me that he’s not silently slipping away from me, even after all the progress we’ve made.
I take a sip of my drink, tangle my fingers in the horse blanket, and thumb up to the next video. I’ll keep doing this until I feel ready to go to sleep, and in the morning, things won’t seem so bad.