Sleep sat upon his shoulders in the dim room. Yellow-red light spilled across the carpeted floor, corrupted and scarred by horizontal lines of shadow. He felt along the cold wall for the light switch. He winced and stumbled back as the sterile white light burst on. Sighing, he lay down in his bed. The frame creaked. His eyelids slid shut. His hand found the switch once again and the light snapped off.
Pulling the thick covers up to his chin, he felt sleep’s gentle fingers pushing down on his shoulder as he relaxed and sunk into the bed. Then he felt her ripped away. The roughness of worry replaced her gentle touch, forcing itself into his mind. His eyes snapped open. His hands snatched the covers. With a violent thrust, he cast them away. Sitting up, he almost gave his neck a kink. Scanning the room, he glanced out the window and saw one of the lamp-posts glowing. He moved to the window and felt her weight on his shoulders again; her fingers gently pushing his eyelids closed. Shutting the blinds, he stumbled back into bed.
This time memory contributed to the effects of his worry. He regretted certain words. He worried about their retributions. Shaking his head, he scooted down in under the covers. Reaching into the crease between his bed and the frame, he pulled out his iPod. With his earphones in, he clicked play and the soothing movements of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons infiltrated his mind. They chased away the worry and memories, but sleep had abandoned him, betrayed him, left him to hang helpless in night’s dark grip. The shadowed room sucked all motivation from his body. He remained laying down, making no attempt to turn on the light, no attempt to turn off his iPod; he didn’t even hear the music anymore.
Something clicked on. Cold air trickled into the room; helpless to stop it, he felt it falling down on him, reflecting off his covers, and entering the poorly painted stone walls all around. Another click and the fan came on, accompanied with a quiet, but unignorable rattle as the cold air poured from the vent in the wall. It was not so much the direct current that bothered him, but the chill’s ever present emanation from the lifeless stone. Something in him laughed, but the silence strangled anything audible apart from the rattle; he thought himself a corpse, dead without release from his body, laying on a slab of ice awaiting his burial and true, eternal darkness.
Something clicked off. The rattle died with the breeze. Silence still reigned in its lonely court, holding bound he, its only subject. The cold still crept into his bones. He shivered and the chattering of his teeth broke the rule of silence. Taking some small comfort in the sound of his own teeth, he made to run his hand through his hair but moved it away when he felt frigid beads of sweat on his forehead. He placed his moist fingertips against the stones. Cold as they were, they were at least always consistent, unlike that whore, sleep, who would return briefly to him and then abandon him right before he fell into the comfort of her bosom. Silence was not loyal either. The cold stones, however, were steadfast, consistent, loyal, but they entrapped him with himself.
He spoke, hoping to hear the stones echo his voice back to him, some semblance of conversation. He hoped in vain. They absorbed his voice as if they devoured his soul and he did not speak again.
He only stared at the stones. He knew where they were. Everywhere. He knew they were white as fresh snow, but in the darkness they were black as starless space. Nonetheless, he stared at them.
He wished his roommate was there, sleeping or not, he would have at least provided the knowledge of the presence of another human being. But he was rarely around anymore. The cold stones replaced the warm companionship of human presence. Glancing toward the closed door, he remembered the last time he had been around a large group of people. They were loud. They were annoying. And he felt no less alone with them. He had even wished for the quiet solace of his room. Now, in the midst of the darkness and quiet of that place, he wished those people would come bursting in.
It was not to be. No one came into the room. Not one sound found its way past the door from the hallway. Nobody would be out there anyway. Not at this time of the night anyway. He glanced toward where he had once placed an alarm clock. Dropping his head back into the pillow, he chuckled at his own lack of memory. He had forgotten that clock at home.
Home. Now there was a thought. He had not thought of it since he had come back to school. The memories of May’s faint whine carrying through the house warmed him from heart outward. That noise which had once frustrated him. Now it was a sweet symphony of tiny, faint notes that faded out, leaving silence. This silence was a comfortable silence, a loving silence, a silence filled with the knowledge of her. His thoughts shifted to his father’s snoring and the drone of the narrator of the WWII commentary describing some forgotten battle. They shifted to his mother and how, even in his adulthood, she would visit him at night to wish him sleep well and to tell him her love.
He opened his eyes to the sunrise peeking through the blinds, casting light upon the floor. He sprang from his bed. Grabbing the thin cord, he yanked the blinds open, letting the light flood in and wash over him. He felt the slight warmth of the sun combine with the warmth of his heart as he remembered his family and enjoyed the beauty of the sunrise. The darkness was gone. The dead night was banished for as long as the sun reigned over the sky. For now he was awake—for now he was warm.