Recollections of Sleepovers Past

I lay on the inflatable mattress, eyes pointing toward the ceiling but not seeing it, focused on the conversation that took place between us.

We talked about our youths, mostly "guy stuff", mostly to pass the time.  It had been a long day and we were moments away from turning off the light for good and sleeping.  Something was familiar about this moment, something intimately real about the way we both lay there talking after a day of hanging out and goofing around.  It was just as it had been when I was a child staying over at a friends house, only he was nearly forty, and I was closing in on thirty.  We weren't children, not by any stretch, but our FRIENDSHIP was.  Suspended in animation by his youthful sensibilities and our mutual lack of responsibility, and in that moment it was real.  I was twelve again, before the fall of my innocence, before touching all the mature things that would spoil me.

Then the lights were out, and I was left alone in darkness, the only remnant of my companion the steady breathing that would soon turn to deep guttural snores.

In that moment I, too, remembered how it was in this moment in my distant past.  I had ALWAYS had trouble sleeping.  If I were twelve again I would have waited a half hour or so then asked him if he were still awake, if he wanted to talk some more, wanted to play.  The day would be wasted, but I wasn't done with it, wasn't ready to let go of all the fun I was having.  For when the morning comes, I'd be off to my home again, off to the grim reality of living in poverty and having no connections with those I called family.  Only now, in the present, in the NOW I had no family to return to.  I had a cat, a friendly one,  but a cat all the same.  And though she needed me in the way family needs each other, she couldn't respond in kind with soothing words and gentle handling of my issues.  My family was gone.

Not in the sense that they had passed on, but that I had passed on from them.  The connection we once bore was gone forever.  And there WAS a connection, though in my flights of fantasy I saw myself as the black sheep among black sheep.  They were so close, most within the city limits, yet I couldn't find the will to make that connection again.  At family events they  made me nervous somehow, as if surrounded by a pack of wild dogs that could strike out at any moment if provoked.  They had given me reason to feel this way, yet the feeling was still, in its heart, unreasonable.  Even when they reached out a kind hand, I looked on at it with suspicion.

No amount of time would heal those wounds.  I was truly and finally alone...