Running Up That Hill

"It doesn't hurt me.
Do you want to feel how it feels?
Do you want to know, know that it doesn't hurt me?
Do you want to hear about the deal that I'm making?
You, it's you and me. " -- Kate Bush, "Running Up That Hill"

Jack returned home around three in the morning, his shirt damp and smelling of cigarettes, whiskey and stale cologne. He switched on a a single lamp on the first floor, leaving only a small area of yellowed light barely illuminating his coffee table and half his sofa. The rest of his loft was still encased in shadows and moonlight.

He untucked his shirt, unbuttoned the cuffs, but otherwise left his clothing on except for his shoes which he had kicked off when he walked through the door. He went to his kitchen and opened the window, letting the cool Santa Ana winds rip by and chill his skin through his shirt. Then, as he did every night, he opened his fridge and pulled out a blue water bottle. He went to the kitchen counter, twisted the cap of a small plastic bottle, and shook a chalky, hexagonal pill onto his hand.

About a month ago, Jack had switched to taking the SSRI at night. The sudden extra serotonin available to his mind had left him detached and tired during the day, so he realized that he could use the SSRI as a sleep supplement as well as a equalizer if he took it in the evening instead.

Jack placed the pill on his tongue, and then took long, deep pulls from the cold water bottle. He placed the bottle back in the fridge and stood in front of the window, letting the moonlight pour over him.

Each of these actions were slow and deliberate. Jack had taken to imagining everything from a third person perspective, every move a scene in a mental film, a photograph. His actions would exhibit a slow, unassuming manner. If a neighbor across the street had looked at Jack's loft, he was see a silhouette, hands in pocket, framed by bone white moonlight and a dim paper yellow backlight.

This narrative was an exercise in detachment, a complement to the pills and the therapy and the alcohol and the cigarettes. For the past month, he felt anything but detached. Even with the SSRI, he had failed to sleep more than three hours a night. His mind had turned into a mobius strip of circular thoughts of disappointments and frustration. His heart was a pronouncement of broken sighs.

Jack had gone out tonight in an attempt to distract himself. This was the Boys are Back in Town Scenario, walking with his friends in a confident swagger. Buy the Betties drinks, chat them up, play the role of Lothario in a leather jacket and hope those slender legs are wrapped around the waist by the end of the night.

And for a while, Jack had played that role admirably, nodding his head to the giggles of the student/bartender/actress of a brunette that sat across from him. But inevitably, there were lulls--pauses while waiting to buy drinks, or the minute to take a piss, or the inevitable awkward silences--that allowed reflection to break through.

As reflection broke through, so did Jack's inherent intensity. It was not enough to randomly fuck some woman he'd be relieved at not hearing from ever again. There was something in his totality, a compulsion, an obsession, that propelled him to find deeper meaning in everything. There was something in him that conflated deeper meaning with emotion, so that all of Jack's actions were governed by a need for passion.

He would imagine, during these times of reflection, that the rules of perception fundamentally shifted, suddenly allowing everyone to see emotions. In that instant of change, Jack would flare into a brilliant red aura that would suffuse the bar.

But reality was not so accomodating. That swell he felt in his chest, that thunder in his heart that he had begun to feel with only a certain someone, could not change the brush offs, the unreturned calls. That the cascade of emotions were not fundamental rules underlying reality, that longing that felt so certain was not a fourth law of thermodynamics, was beginning to lead Jack to a nihilism of which he did not want to enter.

And so, like every instance he had gone out the past three months, Jack would detach himself. He would be cordial for the rest of the night. He would drive himself home along the empty Los Angeles streets, lit only by the orange streetlights and the blue of his car's dashboard.

He would walk slowly, deliberately into his loft and take his pills.

But tonight, the Santa Ana winds had blown away the smog, leaving the night sky clear so that the stars shown. And Jack, standing at his kitchen window, illuminated by moonlight, looked up at Orion, and let himself hope for a world in which longing was just as tangible a force as thermals beneath a bird's wings.

"C'mon, baby, c'mon darling,
Let me steal this moment from you now.
C'mon, angel, c'mon, c'mon, darling,
Let's exchange the experience, oh...

And if I only could,
I'd make a deal with God,
And I'd get him to swap our places,
Be running up that road,
Be running up that hill,
With no problems."