and their reply will cause me to buckle to my knees

Every night around this time, I take a pill to help me sleep. With a glass of water, and a bit of hope, I'll float off into the only place that I feel welcome… darkness, silence, emptiness… sleep. This nightly ritual that I never deviate from is nothing more than a game I play with my brain to keep it from realizing that it's now the time to dream. Dreams aren't welcome anymore. I reject the idea of dreaming, because my dreams are populated with content pulled from the deepest recesses of my brain. It's a place where memories of girls I've loved, and friends I've had, parties I've attended and smiles I've worn while visiting beautiful places and having wonderful times in a world where there was always someone on the other side of the table, and when at my most lucky, someone's hand always wrapped within mine. In a dream, there are no rules, no boundaries, and unless the it's part of the story, no rejection. I reject dreams because I remember them the next day. The stories where I've found love, or life, or success, or treasure… unroll on their own, without any way for me to shape them and restrict them with the sad realities of an ever increasingly lonely existence. And when I wake up the next day, and the idea that things might have turned out just a little bit differently is fresh in my head, the sickness in my stomach brought on by the fear of ending up all alone prevents me from doing anything else but wishing I was someone else, or somewhere else, or in a different time.

Every morning after the sleeping pill fails, after a night of dreams playing out like a movie marathon, I search for the words to describe what I just felt, and what inside my head I just saw. I scramble to slap together sentences that might deliver some meaning, but just as any other time I've managed to get my thoughts in order, the sentences mean absolutely nothing to no one, and the cycle continues. I live with an increasingly painful, terminal hangover-like sickness brought on by my mind running freely with the idea that somewhere in the future, I will say something to make someone smile, and their reply will cause me to buckle to my knees, and the chain reaction that follows will spawn a story so epic that Romeo and Juliet will look like a young man and woman, brought together through an old fashioned arranged marriage without ever knowing one another, being completely incompatible and under the pressure of their culture to make things work, causing the man to develop a drinking problem and, full of the anger he has from being stuck in a mediocre job with no opportunity for promotion, to relentlessly beat his wife who longs for a familiar face she sees through the window that looks on the street below, forming a fantasy of him rescuing her from her prison and taking her away where they'll live happily ever after.

I so badly wish that I was a musician. I wish I could write poetic and beautifully structured lyrics coupled with the crescendos of instruments punctuating the lines of deepest meaning. Music is so universally adored, and every person I've ever wanted to notice me has, at least once in their life, put on a pair of headphones, pressed play, and willingly let the tears flow as the lyrics touched their heart. But instead of being able to create a monumental symphony that expresses the beautiful thoughts and simultaneously simple and epic dreams that fill my un-beautiful body, I'm a hack that spits out streams of conscious onto a computer. I'll never have the experience of standing on a stage, thousands of people watching me jump around and sweat from the adrenaline and rush of making an impact, performing to a crowd where there just might be one girl who, being bounced around the floor, hears the words I scream about the life I want to lead and realizes she wants those things too, and she feels the same way, and that I put a smile on her face, sticks her arms up in the air and is pulled above the crowd, and makes her way to the stage where she admires my performance from the side, until after the show when we can try our fucking best at being happily ever after. Instead, my words are thrown into a file, converted into 1s and 0s that, from a distance, all look the same, pushed across the internet where they become one page in a place of billions, with no way of getting out unless a random search leads someone's eyes their way, most likely becoming confined to a list of things no one wants to read, the description pushed further and further down the list as time goes on.

There is nothing I wouldn't give to be able to take one person, just a single girl who I think is beautiful, who I find charming, or funny, or talented, or mistreated, and explain to her who I really am. I want to tell someone everything about me, why I've ended up this way, where I've gone wrong, why I deserve to be forgiven, what makes me confident that a second chance is all I'll need to change her world. I'd love to call up one of the girls who popped into my dreams, and tell her I've been thinking of her. And due to the unfortunate fact that I'm no one and mean nothing, reassure her that I'm not meaning to be creepy, or weird. I'd love to let her know that I think she's beautiful, and that I've always thought so. And that I want to know how she's doing, and what she's been up to, and how life has treated her while I've been invisible to the world. I'd do anything for the opportunity to outline the great qualities she possesses, and tell her she deserves the world. And then I'd thank her for the privilege of being able to talk to her, and have a moment of her time. In a perfect world, dare I say in a dream, she'd smile and question me back. She'd listen as I told her how lonely and rough these past few years have been, and how the nightmare of depression and suicide isn't any easier to recover from when the whole world is passing you by. She'd comfort me as I confessed how afraid I am of ever being myself again, and of ending up completely alone. And maybe as the conversation went on, she'd find that everything I want, and everything I am fighting for, is exactly what she's wanted all her life too, and this conversation would lead to another shared over a cup of coffee, and then a walk in the park, and then dinner, a movie, a night on the couch getting drunk and messing around. Or maybe she'd just wish me the best, and give me a generic compliment hinting that a girl not her would be lucky to have me. Or maybe she'd just be a really good looking friend, and we'd confide in each other and share our deepest secrets, way into our golden years without becoming anything more. But just the idea of being able to talk to someone, and share with them the thoughts that eat away at me each night, and turn to tears on those dreaded occasions when the sleeping pill takes too long to kick in, is something I long for with every ounce of my being.

But words in a journal can't express that. They can't make it sound appealing, or convince someone to give it a try. They just reinforce the fact that while some people pose for pictures, kissing each other on the cheek, or spend nights on blankets looking up at the stars, or even nights alone with that tight feeling in the chest one gets when they can't wait until they see their other half again, I have a sleeping pill, a glass of water, an empty spot in a king size bed where another body should be, and a computer. But God, what I could do with a song…..