Midnight is where the day begins

It isn't quite midnight but is close enough. The house is quiet and Bono is sighing and fluttering through Your Blue Room. Ishee is asleep at my feet. It's strange how animals know when there is something wrong with you. Ishee isn't the nicest cat, more apt to bite than to purr. But he has been an angel since I got sick.

Have you ever listened to the silence of your house, late at night, just turn off your TV and mp3 player and listen to the silence coming from the house. Small creaks of the frame of the house settling, the sound of snoring in the other room, the ticking of the carriage clock on the mantel, and in my case the clack of the keys of my keyboard as I write this.

The house is so loud and busy otherwise. The TV's are playing and the phone rings or someone knocks on the door. The cat is complaining about the hair laid across his bunghole and you can hear the cigarette burn when you put it to your lips to take a draw.

I remember in college, I took this class about disablilities and one of our assignments was to cripple ourselves for three days. I went blind. I have these dark Bono sunglasses and I took water soluable glue and stuck cotton balls on the inside to keep my eyelids down. I normally wear corrective lenses, legally blind without them, but I wanted to see what it is like to be blind.

It's wierd. The outside is scary, because it feels like you are walking on the edge of the earth and you are about to fall. I went to the grocery store and I seemed loud and smelly, fruit and vegetables smelled gone over. Flowers feel like strange alien insects. I tried to sit in the kitchen while mom was cooking and it was too loud. So I got up and went into the living room for TV. The only shows I could watch with real meaning was Roseanne and MASH because the characters are as familiar to me as the people I live with. Other programs were like reading a book with pages missing.

The only time I would take the glasses off was to bathe. I turned out the bathroom light and lit a candle and bathed that way. It was very abstract, but as I lay in the water, I felt like the way the blind fetus must feel floating in it's amniotic seas. I have several books on tape and I listened to one of those. I recorded my journal every night before I went to bed.

Blind sex is bizarre. I was dating a boy and he took me to his house and we made love and it was strange because I had no reference point. Sex is so much about seeing and being unable to watch him moving against me and look into his eyes was distracting and I had a difficult time reaching orgasm. TMI? Tough, don't read this if you don't want to. One thing that was fun was exploring him with my hands, his face, his hair, his chest and legs, his penis, smelling every part of him, feeling his body hair. But when he did the same to me, it was as if my body was not my own anymore.

Food was fun though. My mom would fix my plate and then we said the plate was the face of a clock and the potatoes were at twelve, the corn at three, the meat at six and my bread at nine. Food tasted richer though. So there I was, in the dark, realizing that midnight is where the day begins.