Dueling Hours

His kisses are the sunrises I’m never able to see. Mine are the sunsets he comes home to. It is the only way we are able to tell time anymore, by our short kisses and wishful longings. We live for the passionate yet fleeting touches; An embrace of fingertips as we pass each other in the hallway, or a touch on the shoulder to indicate that yes, I am still alive and so is he, even though we are now ghosts to each other. 

He and I were once the same. We slept until the first few rays of light woke us up. We had breakfast at dawn when our kitchen was filled with a pale orange light. It made everything, including us, look like treasures of King Midas. 

I recall the warm smell of recently brewed coffee as well as the sound of the kettle whistling on the stove before it was removed. Though I adore its scent, coffee has never been my choice of drink first thing in the morning. But it is the first thing he must do, the first thing he must have, to tolerate the mornings I so much enjoy.

Once he’s had several sips, I’d pad into the kitchen with bare feet and a heavy stomach. The kitchen was my kingdom, my domain to which I ruled with a swirling whisk in one hand while cradling a bowl of pancake mix in the other. He’d sit and watch from the living room, knowing better than to interrupt an artist while in the midst of their work. It would be as equally foolish as driving towards a tornado, or sailing on the high seas towards a set of cautionary gray clouds. 

No, he knew. Best to wait out the storm, for that is when life blooms the brightest. 

And the pancakes become the fluffiest. 

Now my kingdom resembled the ruins of a once bountiful civilization. There were hints that it had sustained life, but they were few and not so easily discernible. The fridge sat bare save for a random smattering of collected sauce packets from the takeout place down the street and a fort built from the styrofoam containers of half enjoyed leftovers. 

I have become a ruined ruler these past few months, unable to keep up with the demands of my subjects. He is willing to rule for me, but I can't allow someone who burns pans to take charge. A decision to which the takeout place down the street and the adojing eateries have profited greatly from these past few months. 

I slip out of bed as he slides in. We exchange a handful of affection phrases meant to convey all that cannot be said, before I close the door to leave him to his slumber. 

As a child of the morning, I find the night a stranger I’ve yet to acquaint myself with. We introduced ourselves but haven't moved past the awkwardness of our first meeting. I am so shy and the night so silent that I’ve come to realize how alike we are despite our obvious dissimilarities. How we move past the inelegance established between our inaugural meeting is a conundrum I’ve not uncovered a solution for.  

I turn around and lean forward, touching my forehead to the bedroom door separating us. My hand moved to the brass knob, loose still from when we first bought our home together. We were excited at the naive prospect at doing things our own way after both having spent years confined to apartments where landlords stifled individualism in favor of bland uniformity. Any attempts to color outside the lines was done away with followed by a hefty fine. 

There was no desire in my heart for us to stay in this iteration. To have our only encounters be when the day faded into night and the night turned into day. In this way I am the moon and he the sun; two lovers cursed to be eternally apart. How cruel of life to believe we could manage this way. To be bound but never together. 

I yearn to be selfish, to open this damn door and crawl back into bed so that I may feel his arms wrap themselves around my body the way they used to. We don’t need to talk; that much will be enough for now. When the morning comes, then we’ll discuss the days and their occurrences, conventional or otherwise. He’ll brew his coffee and I’ll make us pancakes. Things will be as they used to be, in the days before I’d agreed to tie my fate to the night while he remained the morning’s son. 

I should’ve said no when I they asked me. I should’ve made my disinterest so palatable that their tongues curled inward from the bitter taste. I should’ve reigned my ambitions in instead of allowing them to roam the plains as wild beasts. 

I should’ve quit when the promotion came, except quitting comes with a slew of problems because no one wants to hire someone they believed gave up when the tough got going instead of telling the tough to go back where it came from. But when you give up everything you have for someone who isn’t family, for a place that isn’t home, they will expect it always. 

My phone rings.

Forehead still pressed against the door, I reach into my pocket to uncover the disrupter. 

The hospital.

I’m twenty minutes late. A patient needs urgent care. 

I’ve found that I don’t care to be urgent. 

***

She believes me to be asleep, but I hear every movement she makes as she readies herself for work. Her phone rings, but she ignores the call, trampling instead into the bathroom where with a twist of the faucet, water rushes forth in a predetermined pattern set forth by our shower head. 

Exhausted as I am, I contemplate leaving the comforts of the mattress to join her under the warm spray, to plead with her to stay with me this night so that I might finally enjoy sleep instead of dreading it. I fantasize about burying my face in her freshly washed hair, breathing in the scent of the lavender shampoo I bought her as a Christmas present. Her frigid body would lie against my own, and I’d joke with her that I must’ve married a vampire or some variation of an undead creature. She’d kick and I’d laugh and we’d stumble into a much needed night of rest. 

As I daydream, the water stops. The plastic shower curtain crinkles when she moves it, indicating she's finished. 

With that, the opportunity vanishes, and I chide myself for being such a coward, for refusing to be the man I should be instead of the one I am. But how could I come between her and her work? How could I allow the selfish desires of a husband to overshadow the desires she had for her career? They were mutually exclusive, and because of this, I’d stepped aside. 

Because that's what we do for the people we love. We long to see them happy, even if it’s not us who makes them so. 

Sleep is not swift with her arrival, as has been the norm these past several months. I thought by now I’d have grown used to a lonely bed, but that has yet to be the case. It’s as if I must acclimate myself to living without a heart, a feat impossible for the human body to achieve. So it’s no wonder sleep abandons me, or I abandon it. What is the point if I’ve lost my heart? If I cannot live otherwise without it? The only thing now that sustains me are the lips that kiss mine goodbye each evening. I live for such a sensation, brief as it is. I work through the long hours of the day, racing home after every shift so that I can feel those lips, never tempting time to miss them. There are those that tell me I’ve become too dramatic, that a kiss is just a kiss and never anything more. But those words come from the mouths of those who have never truly loved the way I have. The way I do. For they would not speak them if they only knew what it means to live without their hearts beating life into their purposeless shells. 

I used to be one of those shells, a husk of a man with no solid sense of himself. I was a man who found his amusements during weekend parties at the houses of people I did not know with those I’d never met before then, and still have yet to meet after. I lived for those nights; the weekdays were a river of molasses dragging me to the bottom of its honey golden depths to suffocate what little life I had out of me and replace it instead with a saccharine substance. 

And then I met her, and my days were all the more brighter. Colors muted to me became bold and vibrant. Sights I’d never heard of were ones I now visited frequently. I left the house more often. Washed my face more than once a week. Changed myself for the better to prove to her that I was not only worthy of her attention, but her love as well. Change is not entirely the negative that some people treat it to be. It can do wondrous things for the soul and bring into being revelations I’d never imagined possible. I wasn’t a changed man. 

I was a brand new model. 

But now I find myself slipping into the old ways, reverting back to the college kid of yesteryear who hardly took care of himself for his own sake and saw the world only in various hues of monotonous gray. The molasses seeks to pull me back under, but the only thing keeping it at bay are those kisses. 

Those damn kisses. 

I toss and turn, lay on my stomach and then my side, switch the pillows then remove them all. But nothing works. 

I check the time. It’s nearly midnight, and I huff because though I don't care about it, the body needs rest. My job is not my ambition, but that doesn’t mean I have any intention of failing at it the way I’ve failed most things in my life. 

With the night settled in, an idea strikes me. It’s silly and absurd and completely illogical. But I need more than whatever this proverbial thing is between us. Every relationship encounters difficult moments, but these moments will not pass unless steps are taken to resolve them. 

I’m tired of these dawns and these dusks. I want the days and the nights and everything in between.

I dress myself in a casual pair of sweatpants and a hoodie, well aware I’m not looking my best. But that’s fine. She’s seen me in a state much worse than this one. I grab my keys out of a bowl she’d bought specifically for said purpose because I'm always placing them in areas that never made sense.

The hospital is usually about a thirty minute drive, but with such light traffic I make it there in fifteen. The lot is nearly empty, which means I find a space right up close to the main entryway. At the last second I remember to lock the car before I enter. In my haste, I usually tend to forget the most common items and actions. 

But I don’t forget the ward she works in, the floor it's on, or the way to get there. A polite young woman at the front desk asks if I need assistance and I promptly tell her, “No,” as I walk, placing a reminder in the back of my head to apologize later for my sharp rudeness. The elevator moves too slow for my liking, and ignores my need for urgency even as I keep my thumb on the button. It accelerates in accordance of its own two miles per hour will.

The doors finally open to the fifth floor; the doomsday district, as I’ve always referred to it. I'm greeted by a serious receptionist who wants to know why I'm here before letting me in. 

But I barrel right past her and the desk she sits behind because in my desperation I’ve relinquished all reason. I go from room to room in search of her, disappointment growing with each one she’s not in.

Voices shout behind me, but their words are indiscernible. A hand grabs me by the arm and pulls me backwards, but I rip my limb out of its grasp and proceed onto the next room.  

And then I see her, an angel of salvation among the sick. Everything else in my line of sight becomes peripheral. 

And then it fades into nothingness as I feel myself suddenly falling.

***

The dawn arrives, yet there is no sunlight. 

Instead he lays next to me, one arm wrapped around my back so that I lay on top of his stomach, the other tracing the edges of my profile with his thumb. 

Everything is silent except for his slow, steady breathing and the rhythmic beating of his heart inside his chest. When I explained that it was mine, security spared us from punishment, though that did not exclude us from having to listen to a series of exasperated condemnations. 

Except they don’t matter. 

They never truly did. 

When the morning arrives, darkness stays. He doesn’t move, and neither do I. We remain this way for what feels like eternity, the sun and the moon together as one, finally sharing the sky for a time longer than it takes to say “goodbye.”

Instead we say, in between wistful kisses, “Hello.”