I keep finding myself awake at two, three, four a.m., watching the perpetual yellow-red-green-yellow glow of the intersection playing out on the wall behind the bed. The bed belongs to the man I am dating and he is asleep beside me. This is not one specific occasion but rather a string of late-nights or early-mornings over weeks, months; a collection of time where I am always awake and the man is always asleep and it is two or three or four a.m.
The man may not be the man I'm dating, because we may not be dating—I'm not sure. Neither of us has been clear about our intentions, but he has been clear that he is not in love with me. He frequently reminds me of this fact after any tender exchange. I don't think that I am in love with him either; I just don't trust myself enough to say it. I wonder if he doesn't trust himself enough to keep quiet. Regardless, I know that he is the man asleep beside me in bed, explicitly because it is not a feeling. If I just sensed it—if I did not see him there—if I closed my eyes and thought that I might feel a man breathing softly next to me—
A brilliant empty nothing. Snow blindness. The self-fulfilling suspicion that I can't trust myself.
How would you know when to trust your feelings?
My therapist poses the question at the end of our appointment. If there was a signal, what would it look like? An on/off switch, a banner? My therapist encourages me to think of it theoretically, but instead I think about it the way I think about everything: for a very long time. Why don't I already trust my feelings? Why should I? Often it is only in this exhausted mental state that useful ideas occur to me, at the faraway end of an incessant blinking chain of questions. Could the sign of a reliable feeling come as some form of light? It seems just as likely as anything else—any fatal misjudgment, or any accidental success.
I know that mid-monsoon the sun sometimes breaks cover, foretells bloom beyond the storm. I know that the cherry-smolder of a lit cigarette feels like a threat; credible. I know the meaning of smothered orange shining through smoke: everything I love, up in flames again.
It may be simpler than all of that, though, like a system of traffic lights.
The lights cycle on the wall behind the bed. At rest, the man looks like a man. Awake, he is as flighty as a child; his enthusiasm contagious, his reticence complete. He is sure of something, but it is only this exact moment: this moment, here. Look, see how it shines! He seizes those moments. I grasp for them, come away empty-handed.
Sometimes he needs to be with me, just for a few minutes, and so I crawl through the taillights of rush-hour traffic to his doorstep. Sometimes he needs to be alone, which always seems to happen when I need companionship. He cries with me after a cancer scare; he plays video games while I have a panic attack. I buy him gifts for his birthday and just-because; he insists on paying for my dinner but does not know that I was born in October. He kisses the tip of my nose. He ignores me for hours.
When he steps into shadow, I follow; I don't know what I think about him when he's not thinking about me. Clouds across the sun. I think about it for a very long time.
There is a man asleep beside me in bed; it is not just a feeling. On occasion a cop car or an ambulance runs the intersection, wailing, the steady red glow becoming muddled by flashing red and blue. Purple light is unusual, and I perceive it as ambivalence. Is it more indigo, or violet? It looks like a blacklight, which means that something is hidden. Desires, or the undesirable? The man beside me sleeps through.
On foot I'll always jaywalk rather than wait for the sign to spell it out for me: WALK. When it comes to my feelings, I'm not even waiting for the light to change; I'm waiting for the power to come on. I'm willing it. But emotions don't ever walk, they drive—always speeding, weaving, ninety mph through residential zones. Is that intuition?
One sleepless night the man, thoughtful for an instant, offers me a sedative. It's useless. Behind my eyelids a riot of floodlights and flashlights, flashbacks, something lost, something stolen, someone fleeing the scene of a crime. If I trusted those kinds of feelings I'd never trust anyone again. Forever flushed under the unnerving fluorescence of a school gymnasium, an interrogation room.
It is never dark within me. There are so many lights; I just can't figure out what any of them mean. Each light is a question, strobing incessantly. I think about it all the time.
What would it be like to trust my feelings? A solid, steadfast green light; moving forward knowing that I am safe? Or running the reds, ablaze and wailing with bright intention, trusting everyone else only to get out of my way?
The cycle runs again, endless. The man half-wakes at times, pulls me closer, dozes off again, turns to the wall. I yield to his movements, toward and away. The yellow light doesn't last as long as the green or red, but seems to have become brighter. It tells me to stop, unless it is unsafe to do so.
Am I safe yet? Can I stop now?
How would I know?