3:00 a.m…
My bedroom was on the third level of my condo. But I couldn’t go near it. Nights were terrifying. You never feel an illness, your problems, or your despair more intensely than in the middle of the dark nights. I couldn’t take being upstairs. Alone. Surrounded by the din of silence.
I was already so alone in my life. The days I could crawl through. I would get up. Dress. Thank God I wore uniforms to the lab, so I didn’t have to figure out what to wear. Then I’d go to work. And even as I didn’t want to talk to anyone, at least there was the busyness of work, people, and routines to keep me going.
But the nights….oh…the nights
For months, I slept on the flower-patterned sofa in my living room, my dog stretched out on the floor next to me. Thank God for the dog.
The room didn’t have a lot of furniture, but it had enough to feel like a secure cocoon. The sofas. A microwave and table set. The clock. And the TV cabinet.
The TV. I would leave the TV on all night. Unlike when I grew up, and TV stations went off at midnight, now, with cable, there was always something to watch. It’s not that I even wanted to watch anything in particular. I just needed the sounds of human voices. The sense that I wasn’t as alone at that moment as I truly felt in my life.
I would put on HBO so that no matter how many times during the night I woke up, there was the comfort of hearing a human voice. I will admit there were some really strange things on at 3:00 in the morning, but it didn’t matter. It wasn’t about content. It was just to have “someone” in that room with the dog and me.
It was just so I might make it through another night.
Soul Mosaic 
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