Short Story: The Bell

Top Gun: Maverick releases for streaming on my birthday. It is just a coincidence, but one of those coincidences that is not. The last time I saw a Tom Cruise movie I was in a hospital with two IVs in my arms and the taste of blood in my mouth. There was an all-day Mission Impossible movie marathon on TBS or some other basic-cable station. I think I fell asleep somewhere between Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol and the end of Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation. There were some drugs, and they gave me some drugs, and then they gave me some other drugs once they stopped the bleeding just in case since the other drugs might cause seizures in some scenarios. Someone asked me what my favorite movie was at some point, and I just said Mission Impossible and when they asked what other movies or whatever else I liked I just said the name of another Mission Impossible movie not because they are my favorite movies or anything but because partly they were playing on the tv screen on the wall right in front of me and also they were the only movies in the whole world there in that moment. Nothing else existed.

In 2019 I would ride my bike a lot and then come home and just start eating from burning five thousand calories a day or whatever and around when the darkness was still real and the world would start to feel all small like doom on a bell I would put on one of those Mission Impossible movies and usually only make it through the first half-hour or so and that was okay because those first half-hours of those movies are really good and sometimes I would not even remember going to bed and sometimes stumbling like drunk stumbling but I wasn’t drunk just my body was not my body anymore so heavy with the day waves crashing into me and the body my body somebody’s body, my body—it was sleep’s body and sleep was the world and nothing else and no one can ever know how real that felt, really I can’t tell it right even though I am trying to tell it. Some days now when everything is now the darkness feels real still and dread creeps in like some cold slithering winter fog and I get excited or maybe scared or I cannot see at all as in the dark and suddenly I can’t wait for the rain and the wind and more haunted days. I can’t wait to be haunted.