1200 words

"Good Night"

As I travel the hilly path of this stable sidewalk below me, my metal shield keeping the cold from gripping my bones, I think to myself this party better be worth it. I branch off from the guys for a bathroom break in the back alley of a building. Out of all the illegal things students do at OU, public urination will be the act to land you in the back of a cop car. As I release my bodily fluids I look around me. My mind takes a pause and stops to think that kind of thought that only comes when your mind is free as a result of the massage Captain Morgan is giving your brain. This would be a horrible place to be in the midst of one of your enemys. I zip up, meet back up with the guys and continue my travel to our destination. What a great valentines day this will be.

As I see more and more traveler's on the same drunken journey I am taking, thee excitement starts to set in on my already impressive feeling body. We arrive at the party, and it's full to the point that even the yard was even being invaded by random people the owners of the house have never seen, and probably will never see again. The first thing I see when I get into the party is a friend of mine in my math class, name oblivous to me at the time. I bob and weave through the what seemed like a million people to the kitchen. 7 cases of beer lay on the ground, all empty. How depressing I think to myself. I know this night will end one of two ways, from past experience. I will converse with a beautiful girl, get her number, and be satisfied I became more than just some guy at a party. Or I will not, and drink even more as to not think about how option one hasn't occured. At this moment it dawns on me that a very pretty brunnette with blonde highlights is being harassed by two guys standing not more than 24 inches away from me. She has an illumanting glow that lights up that filthy kitchen, like a light bulb in a damp creepy basement. Her smile is amazing, her personality complimenting it even more, because she had an amazing sense of humor. She looks like the type of girl you can watch sportscenter with on a sunday, and she's the one I say to myself. Now when I say harassed, I don't mean verbally or physically. Harassed as in they we're hitting on her, and I could tell she wasn't having it. Then the magic eye contact happens. I look at her and squinch my face up into that look you get in akward situations. This shows her that I feel her pain, and I'm two seconds away from taking it as a damsel in distress call. Two seconds away from pulling her up on my white horse and riding away.

No more than two seconds later, I give her the come here finger, and she steps in between the two guys with happiness, leaving upset, hateful looks on there faces. I don't quite remember exactly how the conversation went. It was a good one though. Her name was Eaven, the name of a goddess, and I was feeling like Hercules. I got her number, left the party, and went to Goodfellas to top off my night. The thick juicy pizza always making the long walk home a bit easier. I get home, throw my good clothes in the dirty laundry, and commence into chill mode and reflecting on the night with my roommates who have their own set of triumphs and tribulations. When this ritual is over, it is reflect on my life time, to the beautiful sound of hip hop in the background of my thoughts. It's about 4 o clock a.m now. This night was different however. I played a song I'd never heard before, which is rare, called "Letter to B.I.G". Hearing the melody of the beat was like love at first site. It automatically made me think of my brother, and how I hadn't gotten around to writting a song for him yet. I would write it to this beat. This would be my masterpiece I think, as a fade away into darkness. Fade away before all the pain and madness I had thought I washed away before brutally lets its presence be known again.

"Bad Night"

It all starts with the curling of my toes and the rubbing of my feet against each other like reticulated pythons, the anxiety in my body having no other way of expressing itself. This action never stops at night, but what will determine if I have a bad night is if that's where the anxiety stays. It doesn't though. The green lights on the cable box read 2 30 in the morning. As I lay on the cool leather of the couch, I look around my brightly lit living room to the other couch, and its emptyness. Visions from the past play in my mind of all the fun nights me and my brother had in this very room, staying up all night watching t.v. Now it is just me, in this empty, quiet room. It's starting to happen. The anxiety creeps up my legs and I have to sit up. It goes from the wiggle of my toes to a full blown leg jitter. Tears start to stream down my face and cries of sorrow escape my mouth as a rock back and forth. All the memories of a past life ripping through my brain and wrecking my present state like a tsunami. My mom is upstairs sleeping. I don't explain to her this nightly routine that I know all to well. She has enough on her plate, and to add to the constant worry about me would be selfish on my part. So each night this fear induced insomnia takes its heavy toll on me uninterrupted. Fear induced because the hour of chaos is coming up. 3 o clock is when I lost my other half. 3 o clock is the anti-hour if your religious, which is when the demons like to play. 3 o clock exactly is when I woke up screaming from the all too real nightmare three weeks before this night. I haven't slept right since. 3 o clock is when my panic attack hits its climax. When I feel tingles in my face from crying so much and the anxiety and stress is to the point that I dig my fingers into my head, wishing it would stop. I'd give anything to calm down right now, but i know this is a wish that only a genie could grant me, and there is no magic lamp in sight. Thirty minutes later this madness hits a calm. However, sadly, this is the calm before the storm.

Post traumatic stress disorder and insomnia is not the bulk of my problems. I go upstairs and lay in my moms bed, quietly so I don't wake her. If you want to know what clinical depression is like, imagine putting your head into a tourniquet, a turning it until it gives just enough pressure to make your brain numb. This numbness causing silent, heavy tears. Not the dramatic cry like earlier in the night. This cry starts with a knot the size of a golf ball in your throat, but this knot doesn't go away. It's a constant pressure, like a hand with skinny, long fingers gripping your neck just loosely enough so that you can breath, but uncomfortably so. I stare at the snow flake patterns in the white ceiling above me, listening to my mom breath heavily. "Lord help me", is the only thought that passes through my battlefield of a mind. That, and what will end this pain. "The mind is a terrible thing to waste". The founder of this famous quote is unknown and unimportant to me at this time. At this time, my own revised version of the quote is all that matters. "The mind is a terrible thing, especially when it wants to waste you".

**there may be more added on to this in my actual memoir. I haven't decided whether I want to dive any deeper yet.