Chapter 2
Sleepwalking
I sit with my itchy mittened hands tucked into the underarms of my sweater, my knees are also stuffed under its misshapen tent which stretches into some amorphous boulder.
My body is crammed completely onto the miniature metal chair that’s small enough to fit on the two foot square landing just below the revolving beacon deck.
Tonight’s cold air seeps between every crack in the lighthouse and directly through the single paned glass surrounding the bulb.
The draft isn’t so bad a few steps down and I can still see through the windows from my small folding-chair vantage point.
Shivering, I untuck my chin from my chest to peer up through the reflective panes, to follow the glow across the slate landscape.
At night, when the beaming light stretches across the water boring a tunnel through a mountainside of darkness, nothing breaks up its vast mesmerizing spiral across the water—at least not usually.
More and more often I have begun to see small glimmers between crests of waves.
The faintest hint of light, like broken glass smashed down into carpet fibers, only catching the light with specific motions of the head and craning of the neck.
As soon as my eyes are able to focus on them, they disappear back into the dark expanse as if fallen stars are fizzling out across the ocean’s chaotic peaks.
“Probably just schools of flying fish,” I huff.
Talking to myself has become my newest bad habit while living here.
Something has got to fill the silence besides the howling wind and the occasional clicking or mechanical whirling I hear beneath the floorboards.
I chalk it up to strange radio interference, or that I’m hearing things, but really it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
Strange things are starting to happen here, stranger than I signed up for.
I just wanted to be alone out here, but every day this lighthouse is becoming more alive.
The sea, which bristles with emotion, brings new phantoms ashore to add to the menagerie of my own.
The morning sun rises once again, and I settle into a makeshift cot upstairs next to the rotating lamp which winds down in the blueish light of dawn.
The heat radiating off the bulb as it grows dim is like the cruelest artificial sun, which even so I am grateful for.
Unfolded stiff canvas holds me like I am nestled in the palm of a large hand, sharp claw-like fingernails included from the rusted frame.
I don't drift to sleep, instead I am just too tired to hold my head up any longer and I surrender to this familiar exhaustion.
Behind my eyelids the early sun thumps red, the rhythmic pounding creating a ring.
Every echo of its pulsating beat forms another ripple in a pond of translucent red.
I shift my head, but the ripples stay fixed in place, revealing they are not a flat plane.
Not the curtain that separates my eyes from the world, but rather a tunnel that extends into that crimson velvet.
Just like that never ending tunnel across the water that the beam punctures through the thick night.
It is a door of concentric undulations that I feel compelled to fall deep within.
Stumbling drunkenly down the path, I reach a soft end, fleshy and warm.
It is a safety I haven’t felt in years. It feels almost as if I’m back in bed with Eli, a lazy morning when he’s shoreside for a few weeks.
Jerking halfway awake I turn around and find myself encapsulated in the translucent pouch.
I remember seeing these washed along the beach as a small child.
A stingray’s mermaid purse drifting through the sea, both safe and exposed. Until a webbed hand reaches out for me—
Cold water splashes against my feet suddenly, violently pulling me back into reality with instantaneous primal urgency.
I tear my eyes open with the sensation of falling, but I’m standing in a cold pool of water just outside the lighthouse.
The door swings softly with the morning breeze in rhythm with my heart.
Awake, I’m awake.
“How did I get all the way down the stairs?”
Even the fish in the little tide pools below me seem to swim in tranced spirals around my feet.
The whole world is in a vibrating haze, everything spinning around me as I shade my eyes from the cold sun, amplified through cloud cover.
Only for a moment, I see that gold sparkling out across the water.
It beckons me to walk further out, but cold little speckles of rain begin to fall against my face, aiming with perfect precision for every freckle across my cheek.
That flickering is probably just that same rain reflecting in the far off distance. Sighing loudly, I utter, “I need more sleep.”
I go back inside and feel that strange clicking beneath the front entrance floorboards.
I stop for a moment, but shake my head and walk up the stairs to my real bed on the mid-level.
Falling into the divoted center, I curl up in my stiff blankets, wishing to feel the safety of that dream once again.