the end of daylight savings time is my favorite day all year, a day that i have declared my holiday as it means more to me than most any other actual holiday. almost more than the "extra" hour of sleep, it's the longer nights that i love, especially those first few nights when you can't believe how early the sun is setting. night time at 5pm is remarkable, if, like me, you like the sun alright, but in small doses and through the filter of soft autumn curtains.

last night, when i tried to go back to sleep, i had a rough time of it, as i am sure you can imagine. it was 85 degrees at 11pm and i couldn't get comfortable. i pretended i was in the movie the big blue and that the ceiling was the sea, i imagined that i was on a bed outdoors on a perfect day, canopied by large trees. i laid in bed in the quiet and listened to the neighborhood noises, tracing the lines of my face and neck and collarbones absent-mindedly until my fingertips made me lonely. i realized that it was too hot for my long sleeved shirt and instead soaked an a-shirt in cold water and, painfully, put it on over my dry hot skin. i drank lemonade straight from the container and i pressed my face into the freezer as if it were the hem of my mother's skirt and i was 5 years old.

soon it was 1am and i put on an episode of this american life to keep me company. it was about the telephone and instead of lulling me to sleep it brought all sorts of memories to the surface. the intimacy of the phone, the soft voices, nights when the most beautiful things ever said to me were whispered directly into my ear, things that made my eyes wet, that made me believe in myself. the memories came to me fast and hard, reminding me of how alone i was now, that even that small refuge, a man's voice soft in the telephone, loving me from far away, was gone. more than what he said i missed the tone of his voice, the gentleness of it, how even when he laughed he sounded sad.

it's his birthday today. i didn't remember until i was laying there last night, and when i did, i caught my breath, because for that moment he was real again. well, at least as real as he had ever been.

before i could ready myself i was crying, but not because i missed him, he is from a place so far away that even though i tried i could not reach him, not really. as the tears slid out from the seams of my closed eyes, they rolled in slow hot trails down the side of my face and i realized that what i missed was the understanding i found in that voice. never before and never since have i felt as if i was really understood by someone. we spoke the same language, a broken english of sadness and night time, of fumbling and hopelessness, of dirt under fingernails and post-marked stamps.

reading that line, i almost feel like i am lying, because though i felt so very understood, a calm and craddling in that, so many of the things he said were like a foreign language to me. no, maybe that's not it. maybe it's that i understood the words but not the tone. or the other way around. ah, this is all confused and backwards, i don't know if i have the words yet to explain what those nights were like, hours with nothing but his voice in my ear in my old room and that ceiling with the pins in the plaster where my sister had a poster stuck above her bed when it had been her room. the grooves left from my fingernails digging in the back of the headboard, i would hold on tight and pull my legs up over and over to see how high and how long i could hold them there. i would trace the grooves as we talked, i would take him outside with me to have a smoke, he would wait until i hung up to leave. there was so much caring there and i don't understand so much of what went on.

i just know that i miss the soft caress of a gentle voice, and i still don't know what exactly it was about him that made me feel like that, what was it about him that held me like that even though there was so much that was fucked up, so much that was bruised knuckles and whiskey-soaked. i can only say that in his small voice, there was a recognition. he recognized me, the inside of me, the dark and the turning center; his recognition brought focus and shape to it, in those moments i could touch it and feel it, almost whole.

this was the first time.

i don't know that i'll ever understand it, i just hope i am one day craddled like that by someone, that the spaces between what we say holds as much as the words themselves. that the hurt and fractured parts of our selves are not so much and so splintered that we can't figure out a way to set the edges against each other, coming together like lips to wine glasses, or fingertips to eyelids.

i shivered in the wet a-shirt and it seemed to me that the voices from the radio-show were now like knives splitting the smooth skin of fruit. i sat up and hung my legs over the bed. i looked at my feet in the dark and then i put my face in my hands, trying to rub the last year away, trying to forget last autumn and winter. i put my hand against the wall to steady myself.

i turned off the radioshow and put on migala.

i curled up at the end of the bed, making room for someone, just in case.

gurb song, migala