12:00 am: go to sleep. You've long run out of short tasks to distract you from the heaviness of your body, made of rags soaking in the waters of your despair, and you've quite forgotten why you're awake in the first place. Girl, wring out your fingers, and go to sleep.
1:00 am: sleep is your cold husband on the other side of the bed, tugging the covers away and not sharing in the madness and sacrifice of this night; he has left you behind, girl. You can't remember his last embrace. He lays there, in his silent refusal to acknowledge your desire for him, unloving and untouchable.
2:00 am: you imagine your favorite cartoon characters from the stripes of light on your ceiling. Where is that light coming from? Your neighbor's back porch possibly, bit you don't really know.
3:00 am: you get up with motivation to do something nice for yourself. You haven't surprised yourself in a long time. You start to clean your room. By 3:15, you are lying down again. You're not sure you deserved the hassle in the first place.
4:00 am: you figure that it might be simpler to start your day now, but 4:00 am as a concept puzzles you. The lines are too blurred; is it today yet or am I still living yesterday? By the end of the hour, you decide it is a trick question. There are no lines at all.
5:00 am: suddenly, you realize there is something wicked about the last lingering moments of nighttime and the birthing breaths of morning, that being on a bridge between two opposite places is more like tightrope walking on a rope that extends from both ends the further you walk to one side or the other. Girl, you stand immobilized, barely balanced, above the widest abyss.
6:00 am: you accept the rising of the sun upon you as if mourning the loss of your mistress moon, who leaves you unceremoniously and with only an emaciated duplicate of herself, receding into your back brain, hand-in-hand with the You who only exists in the night time. They'll be back, girl.
7:00 am: showers need to be scalding hot for you to forget your skin. The steam floods you. You are all but present.
8:00 am: you don't precisely look like you in that big mirror in your front hallway. You look lost under coats of time and grief. Girl, who are you trying to forget?
9:00 am: people are talking all around you. Their voices blend together.
10:00 am: despite what you've told your friends, you do have somewhere to be, but that place does not miss you.
11:00 am: maybe it is all in your head.
12:00 pm: if it's all in your head, why does it nest inside your body? It makes a home in all your valleys and canyons and its voice echoes through you - "What you are looking for is not here either."
1:00 pm: you do pay attention in class this time, but only to not notice the boy behind you who reminds you that everybody will leave you.
2:00 pm: you, too, will leave you.
3:00 pm: the bell rings. Another echo vibrates you. "Are you still here?"
4:00 pm: at this point, the only thing that sobers you is holding your father's painkillers in your hand. You play with the childproof cap. You miss the days when you'd wake mom up in the middle of the night and ask her to open it because your perception of your pain is so simplistic and temporary that all you need is what's in that bottle. But now you will not open it.
5:00 pm: you walk the dog. The tips of the grass give you a crawling sensation on your ankles, and it's too unpleasant. You want to leave. The earth is communicating with you. "You don't belong here either."
6:00 pm: I - nevermind.
7:00 pm: you try to understand the way your heartbeat accelerates when people say goodbye. The hurt explodes off the top of your head, sizzling like fireworks. At the end of the day, you are the only burn victim in this flaming building.
8:00 pm: "Are you still here?"
9:00 pm: girl, you're cracking open at your seams and you can't fill those spaces with other people's stories anymore, empty, cellophane wrapped intimacy. Do you remember what it feels like to be touched?
10:00 pm: even the moments that you're in can't tolerate you anymore. You exhaust your seconds and they escape you, like everybody else. You lost the last natural blessing that means anything. You are alone. For God's sake, why are you still here?
11:00 pm: your mother is right. This is drama. Your father is right. You're a bad example. Your lover is right. You've got nothing to offer. Girl, why are you still here? You are the hurricane taking yourself down. You are ripping your own roof off and shattering your own windows; you step on the glass and debris and curse God for his carelessness, his heartlessness, his terrorism. He doesn't respond. God has left too.
12:00 am: you surrender to the sounds of the storm and finally get some sleep.