text: It is 4:00 AM. I am with my demons. Because sometimes that is what you have to do. You have to lie next to it. The hurt, the heartache. Breathe it in like a lover’s perfume. Taste it like a kiss and touch it like making love. Alone, in your empty bedroom as the rain taps the window, and the yellow streetlights flicker. Alone in your tiny apartment. Among your coffee mugs and paper plates. In the crooked pictures that hang sadly on the water stained wall. In your couch-less living room with the faded blue shag carpet. Contemplation. Rolling around with the uncomfortable and scratchy things that happened to you. The shame. The guilt. The things left unsaid.... It is 4:30 AM. I cried. And my tears tapped the pillow, until they became a flood. Alone in my tiny apartment with the yellow streetlights flickering. Among my coffee mugs and paper plates. I felt the sadness wander in through the uneven hallway, towards my empty bedroom. I felt it fill the spaces between moments and breaths. I felt it overwhelm me. And then, it quietly left through the window, as I opened it to let in the smell of a new rainy morning. I’ve been told to stay away from lonely places, because they can be fresh-made bullshit, because sometimes it can be an opinion or a thought you believe to be true, when in reality, it is not. It is not the truth at all. And in these singular regions of thought, I find clarity. I dissect the emotions and feelings. I carve them away from the reasons of heartache and hurt. Peel back the layers to find the soul, the places where my demons hide. It’s an intimate process, much like foreplay, that the truth and purpose of my pain is found. Meditation. I find peace in prayer and introspection. I never stop. No matter how dark and claustrophobic things become, I keep my faith. In the early morning grey haze, when I am restless and weeping, in my reverie and rumination, the demons are met as old lovers. The sheets are pulled off the corners of the bed, it is raw, the tears come, the feelings can then be felt, the uncomfortable and scratchy things are then acknowledged, and like a secret affair, the demons slip away into the morning light and I am left alone. Naked. And at peace. There are universes that live in black holes-not galaxies-but universes. Some expand and contract, while others permit time travel. Some universes lie on top of the other like teenagers in lust. And there are those universes that come and go as they please. And my favorites are those that collide and intertwine like they cannot exist without the other. I think of universes like rattlesnakes that uncurl, geometric and precise. The Fibonacci sequence unraveling. A woman’s legs uncrossing. It’s all math, science, and our pathetic attempts at making sense of it all. On one planet in one galaxy in one universe of infinite universes we try to make ourselves so important, the most important infinitesimal speck of all the other insignificant specks. We are stardust and imperfect fractions. And it is okay to not fully understand oneself, as long as we continue to unfurl and grow. A budding rose in spring. God is in the rain that lightly comes down outside. The mischief is in the details, the numbers, and the sequences. I sip my morning coffee and ponder this, as I figure out what to wear.