It’s two o’clock.
You are staring at the wall. Sleep has been an elusive personage for the past two hours now. That is not a new thing for you, is it? However, there is a real reason behind your wakefulness tonight, and it is not your recurring nightmare.
You are trying so hard to go to sleep, but you are failing miserably, because you are preoccupied. You are wracking your brain as you attempt to put your finger on the exact reason you are with me when you could be doing so much better, or better yet, when you could be all by yourself and not have anyone to share your life with. ‘Better’ would be the governing adjective from the day you execute the termination.
You mentally begin to prepare a speech to break into when the time comes for you to sit me down and carefully break my heart. “We need to talk.” Oh, please. Don’t cliché your way out of this. There is nothing I can do to control your decisions, or in this case, your uncertainty, but all I can do is beseech you to introspect.
These are the kind of nights on which I urge you to redirect yourself to the day you held my face in both your hands and looked me square in the eyes, unblinking and decisive, and delicately declared that come what may, you would learn to be exponentially patient and kind and forgiving, even when things got more out of hand than you ever could have envisioned.
On nights such as these, I plead with you to remember that entire day we spent with one another that was so dreamlike, you openly begged me to stay with you for the night, only so we can turn the day into two days, and then perhaps eventually a lifetime.
I want you to think about the initial barrenness of your mind and the sudden explosion of colors and music and the sound of the ocean and the one song that would not stop playing in your head the first time our lips established contact, and that even though I was inwardly a nervous wreckage who had already fallen in love with a man I could never, in my bizarrest fantasies, have assembled in his entirety if it were a school project, I took that leap of faith, and I closed my eyes, and my hands found your hands before my mouth found your mouth and the planets ceased to orbit around the sun and began to orbit around us instead, because in that moment, you and I were so phenomenal in our significance that everything revolved around us, and when my fingers interweaved with your hair, it was the expiration of my nineteen-year-long spree of being addicted to nothing.
Since you are already feeling restless and are not capable of sleeping, I want you to devote just a little more time to this. I want your brain to feel and your heart to think of all the things you felt and thought on days such as those, and on nights such as these, I implore you to make yourself believe that you will have that again. Tomorrow, if not tonight, but you will have it.
You can have it tonight, you know.
Because once you have convinced yourself of that, I want you to wake me up at this unearthly hour and share with me the marvelous rediscovery of your love for me and of your faith in us, and I promise you, we will spend the rest of the night making things up to one another.
And then I will tell you that tonight, you made me feel nineteen again.