4:20 a.m

Dear Mr.Matthews/diary,

I know it's selfish of me to have wished that your vacation be cancelled. I hoped that your flight would be delayed, that some unforeseen circumstance would ground you in place.

In the city, instead of Hawaii, with your beautiful family of four. 

Your two children, and your wife. 

Your family seems like perfect material for those actors that are in those commercials for experimental fibromyalgia medication that has too many risks compared to the benefits. 

Smiling all the time, in New York of all places.

I know it's selfish to hope you'd keep your phone on you at all times in case I go through one of my- suffocating sessions. That's what we call them instead of- (panic attacks) because a suffocation session doesn't sound as nearly as pitiful as the technical term.

In fact I could argue it sounds like a training method that James Bond would use.

 But you said that this journal would be my therapist for the next week. Of course journals don't instantly time stamp when you write things, like my phone does, so I wrote the date and time at the top of the page. 

I called you, and texted even though I knew by now your phone is on airplane mode, inside of the leather satchel you love so much. 

Right about now you should be flying over the cyan waters of the Pacific. 

Your glasses are probably sitting at the tip of your crooked nose, and you probably are reading that book on human psychology by that German guy you base most of your treatment on. 

You probably are almost to the point of dozing off, while I'm practically hyperventilating at three a.m, which doesn't mean much to you, because you're transitioning and crossing time zones as I write this.

I don't know whether to write this in a dialogue type of tone or like I'm some raconteur telling a story in past tense. 

So I suppose, I'll just go along with whatever my mind draws up. 

I originally didn't want to write at all. I'm a college student wanting to become a writer. I want to work for The Times. I'm a "tortured genius" who is going through a terrible case of writer's block according to the character trope. 

In fact when you slid this leather bound journal across your oak desk, I laughed.

Laughed because I write fiction and strictly edit, because I won't- and I don't want to write about the reality of things.

I love to create little fantasies where cliches strive and I can move around my creations like pieces on a chess board.

But me writing about myself doesn't work, because there is no guaranteed happy ending, in fact there is not even a hint at a happy ending. 

Anyways, it's now 3:20 in the morning. 

I, Blaise Richards, am up at 3:20 a.m, writing. Which is a strange occurrence. Inspiration usually only strikes me at noon...or lately, not at all. 

I think I'm doing that thing you say I always do. The thing where I keep jumping from topic to topic, just to stray away from the actual point. 

I guess when visions of embers landing on my arms, flames lapping at the house I grew up in, dark skies lit up by rufescent reflections of the inferno raging below fill my dreams every time I reach R.E.M, I have no choice. 

I have no choice but to peel away the second skin that is my sheets, the sheets my legs had been cycling in while I was previously asleep. 

I have no choice but to wipe my forehead glistening in malodorous sudor, my heart hammering against my chest as I sit up, my head resting uncomfortably against my iron headboard.

I have no choice but to just press my hand to my chest, gasping for air as if the panic has sunk it's hands into my chest and collapsed my lungs into nothing but deflated balloons. 

I have no choice but to struggle to breathe, eyes wide open when not too long ago they had been peacefully shut. Because even though dreams feel like hours, they usually are nothing but a fifteen minute venture.

Which is such a laugh to my face. It seems like the dreams last forever, the screams, my helpless paralyzed figure stuck on the sidelines choking up in tears as I study the remains buried in Stygian ash. 

Clouds of obsidian loom over the atmosphere, the moon not even guarding over the horrors taking place on the cursed earth. The moon doesn't  make sure the extent of the damage doesn't reach beyond the black curtain that is the proclaimed boundary of humanity.

No, it's hiding.

Maybe It's hiding because even it is puzzled by the fiery atrocity clawing itself through the forests, through men and animals alike, drinking up every source of energy it can. It's puzzled because there is no sign of rhyme nor reason towards it's Machiavellian methods.

No, it's modus operandi is strictly selfish and self-serving. But, it's fire. It's vermillion and it's minacious, it's beautiful and it's barbaric, it's wynorrific and terribly hypnotic. 

In the way that, you can't help but stare in awe, in fear as your belongings are destroyed by small reflections of the stars shining in burning agony above you. 

My parents used to read the Bible to me. They taught me little tid-bits about Moses and the burning bush. How God spoke to him through it. How it was holy ground and he needed to remove his sandals. 

In my dreams, I'm barefoot. I'm barefoot as the soles of my feet pad against coal stained asphalt. I don't think the street of my childhood neighborhood is holy ground, but it felt as if God was trying to punish us for things that Adam and Eve did in the beginning of it all. 

As if because they disregarded his one rule, fire just happened to have no type of regulation, no rules at all. It doesn't stop, not when it reaches a house, or a person. It just keeps on going, until it's satisfied or dominated. 

Maybe it demonstrates the recklessness of mankind, or the consequences of supposed absolute freedom. Maybe it shows the very gift that fire is can also be a curse.

Like a double edged sword, willing to strike down your enemy but shameless in it also threatening your throat too. 

Or maybe my nonsensical ideas are all just rooted in the thick confusing foliage of trauma. 

Scar tissue. 

My breathing regulates. My eyes adjust to the darkness. And my feet swing out of bed and hit the floor.

Suffocation session over. 

Before I know it, I'm pacing around my studio apartment. Hyperventilating. Times like this I would call you. You're always awake. Insomnia plagues you the same way my dreams torture me. 

You're in your study, reading, and it'll be a random hour usually after one in the morning. You'll answer your phone with a sleep-deprived voice, raspy and breaking like splintering wood. 

You'll ask me what I saw. You'll tell me to tell you the story. You'll ask me if anyone ever helps me. If anyone speaks to me in the dream.

But it's always the same answers, same scenario except small changes. Maybe someone does speak to me, maybe they're a neighbor or a fireman, but I always wordlessly reply. 

Smog and emotion having seared my vocal cords to the point of them being unusable. 

Maybe I let out a small croak of acknowledgement.

Never words. 

And then you'll say what you always say. 

That's it's a sign that I feel emotionally silenced. That talking about what happened is like inhaling fire for me, and that all I can exhale is smoke. Empty words. 

And then you'll try and calm me down. 

You'll ask me what I had to eat, what classes I had to attend, what professor I hate the most. 

Because you've been my therapist since I started at NY State two years ago, and me even calling for the last three months when I'm having a tough time is an accomplishment in itself. 

Because you know you're the only one that cares, other than the seventy year old woman who lives downstairs, the one who brings me fresh mint leaves to brew into tea, because she says that it got her through college. 

I don't like tea much but as I'm writing this the kettle whines on my mustard yellow gas stove, puffing out aromatic clouds of vapor. 

The smell is therapeutic enough. It doesn't smell like worn leather and dust like your office. Instead it smells fresh and lightens the thump of a headache forming at my temples, it smells like spring.

This is the next best thing. I'm sitting at my desk, the one I constructed from Walmart and got very confused by. Some of the shelves are crookedly installed and screws are missing here and there. 

It's not very nice but my studio isn't very nice either. I could probably have just stayed in bed. But then I wouldn't be able to see the moon and stars. My desk gives way to the excellent view of the sky. The city lights of course, obscure the view of the burning balls of fire, but not the moon. 

The moon is big, an all seeing eye surrounded by a canvas of dark ink. It's a full moon, and not even an edge of an iris lessens it's circular shape. Every once in a while, I stop writing and look at it. 

I pretend it's watching me too, and that it too knows and saw the things I have. 

That it's tears of mercury do fall, it's craters burrow deeper when it has to witness the worst, and it's light is in order to guide the way of those lost. 

There's a symphony of argumentative music clashing outside, a sorrowful dog seems to have found it's voice- howling and barking in every octave possible, cars bark and growl at each other in a similar way, and lastly the air conditioner roars. 

I don't think Beethoven would be impressed, but I've lived here for the past five years. It's my white noise. 

Mr.Matthews, you've lived here your entire life, I wonder how you are even able to sleep? Are you making do with the roar of the plane engines?

Maybe. 

They said that the fire could have been the result of a campfire not being put out correctly. The town had rumors saying that it was probably the Boy Scout leader, a hardcore survivalist that had been cited times too many on his misconduct, (firing a gun out in the woods, etc.) while teaching his class.

I don’t know if I think that the nature obsessed man was to blame for the wildfire that wiped out my entire family and our legacy. If so, that’s a bit unorthodox. 

It's almost four now. Time seems to slip away this early in the morning for me. I'm watching the night life that I certainly will never do more than observe. 

There's a man who I've realized is addicted to drugs, hanging by the corner of the sandwich shop across the street.

He's yelling about something, and it's obvious that he's partaken of his chosen poison on this fateful night.

It's hard to ignore.

I can't get a good view of him. It's as if, the darkness has enveloped him and the only discernible clue that he is there is his voice. 

Maybe one, two years ago, he was no different from the rest of us. Another instrument of the orchestra of shuffling feet in New York early in the morning. Maybe we met eyes and I nodded at him a little as we maneuvered around each other awkwardly. 

Or maybe he was on the subway once.

Crazy to think how easily one can slip between sanity and insanity- without even realizing.

It sounds like rusty nails, stinging alcohol, like pain. It is deep, but gentle, like the shattered glass of beer bottles you find in Cimmerian alleys. It sounds like copper.

And he's laughing ruefully. Saccharine laughter that makes the entire experience all the more heartbreaking. 

A subtle frown has crawled onto my face, because I've realized that the moon is witnessing a lot of the broken ones' soliloquies as the dawn presses forward.

Whether they are being written, or shouted into a void-like darkness next to a dumpster, or even barked out despite the strain of a collar.

Maybe the moon knows I’m afraid to light matches, that my eyes linger on cigarette butts. Maybe it knows that I test my smoke alarms obsessively, that before I plug anything in- I check the cord thoroughly, that I hate candles and have two fire extinguishers.

Maybe in the vast caliginous sky that it inhabits, it’s seen everything.

Maybe the moon isn't an all seeing eye and instead a tunnel leading to the light. Maybe as I write this the man is travelling into it. 

The light, I mean.

The man has quieted down. Maybe he thinks the only witness to his suffering is the moon committed to orbiting around the earth, not really having a choice but to watch. 

I wonder if the high has taken effect and he's been swallowed up into a detrimental daze, or if the sandwich shop owner told him to move for the sake of curb appeal. 

It's 4:20. 

-blaise.