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I am so tired I can barely sit up. I have not slept properly in three nights and I am at the point of exhaustion where I can’t eat, move too quickly or hear loud noises for fear of actually collapsing. And yet, I am inexplicably, mind-consumingly happy.
We’ve been writing songs at night.
When he used to write alone and get like this, I worried about him constantly. I tried to get him to sleep and eat (and drink less, and smoke less…) and do everything else I should be trying to get myself to do right now, but I never understood why he’d voluntarily let himself get so absolutely run down and still seem okay in the end.
Now I know.
I fell asleep at the table while we were working on a new verse last night. I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t have woken me; he would’ve sat there at the table and watched me sleep, because I can see in his eyes that he’s as worried about me as I am about him, and yet, he knows he has to let me do this. But my pen dropped from my suddenly slackened hand onto the floor, and the clatter woke me from my brief respite. He was watching me when my head snapped up, and I saw a mixture of regret and relief in his eyes – regret that I hadn’t slept longer, while I could, and relief that I was back with him and he wasn’t left to write alone.
He knows. He’s the only one who can understand the strange exultation of it, the need to create art, no matter what.
We’ve been on a love song kick lately. Roger gets into phases in which all he wants to write are angry rant songs, and other times in which he obsesses over narratives, but lately, it’s been back to old-school love songs, and words have been flowing from our pens and our fingers on my beat-up old typewriter constantly. When he’s found a melody and I’ve scribbled some lyrics, he tries to put the words and music together, and then I get my camera and capture it on film. We’ve never spent so many concurrent nights awake. Making art has never been this easy.
I wonder why, and I think I know the answer, but I’m afraid. But why else – why else would it suddenly be this easy? Why else did we suddenly decide, after years, to make art together? Why is he trusting me with the thing I know is most sacred to him? Why else would it feel like this?
Am I falling in love with him?
I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.
What I do know is this – right now, he is the most important person in the world to me. I love my parents and I love my sister and my brother-in-law and my niece and nephew, but while my love for them is equal, they are not a part of my life the way he is right now. My life right now is here in Alphabet City – Collins, Mimi, Maureen and Joanne, and most closely, most importantly, Roger. He is the only person I see when I wake up each morning and before I go to bed each night, and he is the one I think about when I lie in bed alone, tired, but unable to sleep.
It’s him. Maybe it always has been.
But I don’t know what that means, because I’ve jumped to wrong conclusions before (hell, for a few months, I convinced myself that Maureen and I would end up married one day), and I can’t afford to do it again. What we have is something I have never known until now. In many ways, we are opposites, but somehow, he understands me, and I understand him. I can tell him anything.
Well, maybe not anything.
For instance, I can’t tell him that lately, I’ve been spending way too much time thinking about the meaning in his eyes when he looks at me. I can’t tell him that lately, when he touches me, I start thinking about things I really, really should not be thinking about. (Fuck. I need to stop thinking about… that … now. Right now. Immediately. Why can I not learn to shut my brain off?!)
But none of that is love, necessarily. It’s friendship and it’s attraction and maybe there’s even an element of lust involved… okay, okay, fine, there is definitely an element of lust involved, fuck, yes, there is…. but that doesn’t mean I’m in love with him. Maybe I just have issues with being alone. Maybe somewhere in my twisted brain, I think that calling this love would stake my claim to a place in his life, give whatever it is that we have a legitimate name that others could understand.
Or maybe my mind thinks love because that is exactly what this is.
Until I am 500% sure, I can’t risk playing with the idea, or even letting it stick in my head, because our friendship is worth way too much to risk everything on a feeling I can’t even figure out myself. He deserves more than that. I’m not saying I don’t deserve him, or whatever it is that characters would say in bad romance novels, because I know that I could, if I knew what my own heart was trying to tell me.
Oh, Rog, I wish I knew what I was thinking. I wish I knew what I was feeling so I could tell you, because keeping anything from you kills me, and I hate not being able to be totally open with you. But you’d understand if you knew. You’d understand why I can’t tell you until I know for sure. I can’t tell you yet that your voice is starting to tie my hearts in knots and that I’m learning to drown in your eyes and that your casual touches are starting to do things that are bad, bad, bad news for me if I want to keep living in the same space with you and stay sane. I can usually read your mind, but this is one thing I can’t see, and I wish I could, because sometimes, you look at me when you think I’m not looking and I wonder… I wonder if maybe, just maybe, you’re feeling the same way.
If this isn’t love – and maybe it isn’t, because I’ve been wrong before, so how can I know what’s right? – then I feel sorry for whoever I might eventually fall in love with, because whatever that is, it couldn’t possibly be as much, as all-consuming, as huge as this. Nothing can be more than this. How could it be? This…
Whatever this is, it feels like... everything.