Sleeping with the Lights On

The dull, viridescent light flooded out from the television and tugged at Sophie’s closed eyes, beckoning to be seen. What made Sophie succumb to sleep during her favorite sitcom? Was it the gentle tapping of the ceiling fan? Perhaps her cat Luna’s gentle hum seemed like a lullaby as she rested her head in Sophie’s lap. It might have been her sofa’s cyan cushions holding her like an embrace from her mom whom she dearly missed.

The ice cream she had been digging at was abandoned on her coffee table, threatening to leave a ring in the grain. Sophie had come home with plans of chores; the list had been growing quietly for months. She decided to begin them after one episode but submitted to her mind’s worn consciousness in just a few minutes.

She lived alone in a one-bedroom apartment in Tampa, Florida. Her mom cautioned against living alone. It was far too expensive for a government employed drug counselor. She insisted she did not care how much it cost, so long as she could be by herself. The peeling yellowed wallpaper reminded her of her family home in upstate New York. It felt familiar and welcome.

Her mom had warned her that our surroundings become a part of ourselves. How was she, Sophie, the Sister, the Daughter, going to still be the same person when the people who gave her those titles were no longer around? She’d become distant, her mom feared. But Sophie never wanted those names. Each of them bores straight through her heart.

Her desire to live alone had been an aching soreness in her lungs for almost as long as she could remember. In high school it was all that she could daydream about: not graduating, nor going to college, nor marrying a lover. No, nothing appealed to her more than the idea of solitude. She felt better by herself. She had always been distant from others; a wandering body knocking into lives, never seeming to leave a dent. The people around her always had a way of hurting Sophie, no matter how Sophie treated them in return. Perhaps that’s why she became so aloof. She never felt she fit in. She always was just in front of people, in the same room, in the same conversation, but never knowing how to reach them.

For the first few nights she was terrified that her mom wasn’t in the room next door snoring ardently. Where was her dad clicking away at his computer in his office? Her sister, tripping up the stairs as she came home drunk from an evening out? It bothered her how quiet the space was when it was just her silent footsteps. Luna now filled that quiet space. It was nice to attend to a being that relied entirely around yourself. She loved coming home to piercing sunlit eyes waiting for attention, to be wanted for once.

Her mom always wanted to keep Sophie close by. She was her youngest daughter and her genuine pride. Sophie had a way of truly loving the people who were good to her. A person who was able to see her was worshiped by Sophie. She would, and has, picked up the phone in a cricket whispering night to rescue a friend from torments at home. She has attended funerals for those she did not know just to be a comfort for those who were afraid to see a family member deceased. Her mom saw this in her, her undeniable sweetness and unfortunate trusting nature, and wanted to protect her.

And yet, she did not know how to carry herself. She was clumsily spindly and used her charcoal eyeliner to smudge her inelegant beauty. She was always trying to blend in with the other people around her, even scrunching her shoulders to appear smaller and more casual, contorting into a now pre-arthritic spine. She was too tall, too skinny, took up too much space; a weathered sapling hiding in the shadow of others. She never allowed herself to appreciate the things about her that other people admired, never taking in the sun. She was a beauty who needed nothing extra to shine. She just didn’t know that nothing was an option, always feeling there was something to hide.

Her father drank. Her mother pretended he didn’t. Sophie could not pretend, nor was she able to protest. Her dad loved his family but did not know how to love his family. When Sophie was too young to truly recall, her dad would put her in the backseat of their sedan and take midnight drives around the neighborhood. Her mother, powerless, cried at the window in fear. There was nothing to stop him. Sophie loved her mother, but she couldn’t learn to forgive her for not being able to separate from her father. She couldn’t live like this, but somehow her mother could. Perhaps this is why in high school she became infatuated with psychology and human interactions. How do people talk to each other? It was easier to study this rather than to practice it. For years after, her eyes hooked onto the way people moved, how others danced and clung to each other for life. She studied how people fall into addiction. She studied how people fall into depression. How people avoid one another. How they avoid the knots inside themselves. She studied and practiced on others. She could identify all sorts of diseases and offer remedies to better the people that did not notice her. She knew them all. She carves a piece out of her flesh every time to help someone. A tiny offering to a world that has not yet given anything back to her.

She doesn’t know why she helps a world that has done nothing but reject her, her gangly limbs, her slender frame, the hot booze watering her family tree. The whispers that she was being starved, that her family was too poor to feed her. Every bathroom break was an excuse for purging. And it was. It was an escape to purge the things she had heard. Even her teachers would send her to the nurse’s office to weigh her. These yellowed memories sat around her mind like over-exposed polaroids, never to be thrown away.

She was framed by a world that ostracized her, set-up by a lineage of drinkers, and her only comfort to why this happened to her was that everyone else had a hatred within. She carried that ubiquitous rage with her into her life. It welded her into a tired, misguided creature of solitude whose solace was found in other people’s happiness.

She just wants to be alone now. To be safe and no longer dissected by unempathetic lenses. To get away from screaming parents in a place that never belonged to her. To hide herself from their drunken abuses. She cannot withstand any more of it. It’s too much. It has always been too much.

She’ll always be just a sixteen-year-old girl, clinging to her psychology notes to create distance from a world that terrified her. She will never pause to check if something is wrong. She will always be working, always be trudging, ensuring her evening exhaustion.

And so she sleeps: with the television piercing the shadows, with the ceiling fan tuning out her ruminations, with all her chores left to give her something to do. She will make it to the bedroom one day, but that will take some persuasion from time itself. Maybe the moon will one day be enough to ease her fear of the emptiness, but its yellow iridescence cannot penetrate like the green flickering light of the television tonight. For now, she needs to rest. Let her sleep.