Mrs and Mr North

I can’t sleep. Mr and Mrs North invited me to stay the night. Their home. Their guest room. Their bed. I don’t sleep in other people’s homes, it feels off. This room feels off. It must be the pillows, they’re too squishy. Or maybe it’s something else. The passing cars outside- rather the absence of them. Those cars driving through the night, that awake your half asleep mind; they aren’t here. Although I never thought I would miss this, the comfiness of utter silence has something heavy to it.

   I should have said no, to staying the night. I should have gone home. Why didn’t I go home? Because apparently I had too much to drink. Two glasses of wine, maybe that’s too much for a teenager or a church-goer, maybe not. It certainly isn’t for me. Three facts too prove it.

   First, I know how to hold my drinks. I’m used to having much more than this. That’s the upside of not having a wife, there’s no one home to stop me from drinking. Even with two bottles, I’d still be fine the next day. A couple of glasses like tonight can’t do me much harm, I know that. Barely made me tipsy.

   Second, my thoughts are completely clear. I can think better than most nights, I can think as if no alcohol had ever entered my system. Had I known they would have made me stay the night, I would have gotten much more drunk than this. Of course it would have made a bad impression, but I could have been discreet. Or not. What the heck did I have to lose anyway?

   Third, I can always sleep well, when I’ve had too much to drink. Well, look at me now. Look at me now, God, shadows of night, or whoever is watching. My thoughts are like a noisy fly that only drowns in a good bottle of wine. That fly is louder than ever.

   I can’t sleep. At all. Mrs and Mr North invited me to stay for the night. Why? Because they thought I had too much to drink, when I clearly knew that was untrue. So why did I listen to them? Why the heck did I listen?

   Truth be told, I was about to leave, when Mrs North turned to me and said: ‘Cyrus, you must stay.’ Her voice had changed. It was sweet. Not soft. Sweet. Like a candy you eat until you throat burns, yet you want more. You need more. I couldn’t bring myself to say no to her. She said you must stay and all my lips would answer, could answer, was ‘Yes’.

   That’s when I noticed her eyes. Blue. Of course they were blue. What fun would it be, if they were a color which let me escape? No, they were blue and they dragged me in. She stared into my eyes and I sank in hers. I had never sank into a woman’s eyes before. Maybe I should have, but I never did. I sank in her eyes in a way her husband never did, but which could keep me awake for a lifetime. In a way which made me wonder if I had not, indeed, had a little too much to drink. Just enough to lie to myself. About how Mr North looked at his wife, about how his wife looked at me. About what I so desperately needed to believe was true, when I knew it could not possibly be.

   Oh, shut up, you! Whoever you are, shadows of night. Whoever you are, don’t pretend that you haven’t done it too. Lied to others to make a pretty lady smile. Lied to yourself to be happy. I do the latter, sometimes. When I have to. When I dream, it’s of things which could never be in the day, but are in the night. It’s of things which the wildest parts of my mind can only believe in when the fly stops flying.

   In the utter silence of that night, my eyes slammed shut. Her voice came back to me. ‘You must stay!’ She murmured, louder and louder, until she was screaming and my eyes opened. I felt my heart beating. When had it ever beaten for anything other than fear before? Don’t judge my dreams, you. We’ve all let our minds wonder about the impossible. Although I must admit, that even I, found my thoughts reprehensible.

   I wanted to fight the urge to sleep, until I was far away from this house. But my eyes were closing slowly and my ears were starting to hear sounds, which were not truly there. The echo of her voice, her husband’s laugh, the music, my door opening and closing. I felt her hand on my face. I saw her eyes in the darkness and everything sank away. The only sounds which remained were the music and her soft, whispering voice. A man pure of heart would have fought that dream with everything he had, until his mind would no longer sense a married woman’s fictional touch. I, however, am not a man pure of heart. Perhaps I, too, belong to the shadows.

   I felt soft lips on mine and let my mind pretend that they were hers. It felt more tender than any dream I had ever dreamt. Perhaps because I had never had such audacious dreams before. Perhaps because no dream or thought had ever been so full of something which I could only call love. The fly drowned in something new.

   I slept. Or rather, I had slept. The next morning, I woke up more violently than ever before. Nothing in particular woke me up, not a sound or a light. Just her being stripped away from me so very fast. As soon as my mind returned to my body, she was gone. Never by my side to begin with. That’s what my mind does. It lies to be happy. This morning more than ever before, it pained me to realize that those lies had a cost: their unavoidable ending.

   That morning, we ate breakfast all together. My eyes went from the bread to the orange juice, never stopping to see either Mrs North or her husband. How could they possibly know what I dreamt of by looking into my eyes? They would know, that’s all.

   As I spread jam on my toast, Mr North - who was probably as uncomfortable with the silence as me - animated the conversation: ‘You know, I had the silliest of dreams, last night. Elephants and dinosaurs all around me. I woke up in a sweat and my wife was no loner by my side!’ Utter silence. I almost choked on my orange juice. He continued: ‘Then I woke up from that dream too and there she was! Probably had stayed by my side the whole night, but you know my Cyrus. It lies to make me miserable.’ Mrs North laughed it off. I looked into her eyes. She knew. I knew. I sank.