Night Time Prayer

I stand in my night pyjamas on the  balcony of my house. A day of november . Earbuds should be blasting talk radio or music in my head but fir a second , i turn them off.

Tha air is cold, makes my fingers and toes tingle. I should go back to the tepid, cuddling safety of the room. Buit Not now.

Light up a cigarettte, vicious remain fo a past of toxines injected and expelled from my body. I might even looked grotesque to anyone who passes in front of my building. Pitch Black, cold, only cars drive by with that sound you just hear in late november. That icy wet rumble of the cars. Prrojecting themselves rapidly towards their destination, to meet routine, stress or maybe temporary joy.

And me, slightly chubby and a bit balding, with a severly overgorwn beard, looking at the horizon, the cigarttes diying off between my fingers.

I have been in that exact place beforer, i have stood like a sentinel, drugged out of my mind or drunk, or filled with sleeping pills, anything that would gave me a buzz powerful enough toi calm my anxiety down and fix my holes temporarily.

I stood there for years. At hours much more later than this. Sometimes even seeing the dawn rise with bleary eyes.

Always alone. I wasnt desperately alone, i caused my solitude as a precise choice. I wanted those moments of calm contemplation, of freedom of addiction, where i just waited the alcohol to lower and the nausea and vomit to float away from my body. Those were dark times.

Or i just listened toi epic or sad music, grasping those moments with that incombent fear of death looming over my shoulders. And it manifested as soime sort of vertigo, more close to an attraction for the void than anything elose. Will i fall from the balcony or just throw myself down. Not cause i desired death, but just to see if could do it or stop myself from doing it. An action in a life of passiveness.

But i always poickjed the slowe coward death to the actual suicidal one. I was gonna die one day at a time not in one theatrical act that was supposed to make no one cry.

And my brain filled with thoughts, each one darker than the one it followed. and my heart beating steadily with a sense of weight and pressure, and words that were connected together with web of toxines exhaled at times with the smoke of entire packs of cancer sticks.

But now something has changed.

I am smiling. I stood there, being myself, and yet my mind made me smile with what all my memories are made of: her voice, her face, her scent,m her warmth.

Somethign sweet, clever and funny that she said, that gave me the energy ti goi through days of empotuibness, aching back and scary insecurity. A person that gives meaning to me, cause she loves me and is always there anmd at the same time makes me more motivated than i ever was at anything towards the simple act of living with a smile of my face and the fierce feeeling of tenderness in my heart.

She makes me smile. And i love her. We are one. And i love her.

Its all in one smile and the memories it brings and those meoiries are woirth half a lifetime of trouble and pain.

And worth the eternity.