Vampire Style

 I'm at work. It's Monday night--actually, it's ten minutes into Tuesday right now. This is my Monday night to Tuesday morning shift. I slept all day, from about 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., so I'm not even that tired right now. (My new thing is wearing sunglasses when I get out of bed throughout the day to go to the bathroom or have a snack. I'm pretty sensitive to light, so it actually helps to darken things up. If Dave weren't working from home, I'd probably cover all the windows so the whole casita would be dark. But since living things--not me--need sunlight, we can't do that. If I lived alone, I'd probably try to source a casket to sleep in, vampire style. Wouldn't that be a fun, claustrophobic time? The undead stick around for a really long time, don't they? I could outlive everyone in this joint. But I know that I definitely couldn't take that.)

I worked last night, too. It was a little more hectic last night and the night passed quickly. I don't know how that happened because tonight is crawling by. Still, that's okay. I'd rather have the night pass quietly and slowly because in a psych hospital, the alternative to quiet and slow is never going to be good.

It's very quiet right now. (Sometimes it's so quiet at night that you can hear every creak and whisper and in the daytime the kids talk about the place being haunted.) All my kids went to bed around 9:00 p.m. and have so far stayed in bed. That's the great thing about working with the older kids: They tend to sleep through the night. The younger kids pop out of bed at all hours of the night. They're unpredictable, sleep-wise.

I still like working nights. Some nights it feels like I'm on a ship in the middle of a dark ocean, just me and a tiny crew of people, all of whom know each other too well. It can get a little too close for comfort here, but then I just have to remember the hours and hours of quiet that I have when I'm working solo. I like those kinds of hours, always have, and they're easier to come by in the middle of the night. I like moving through the quiet darkness of those hours.

It's a few minutes before one a.m. now and I only have six and a half more hours to go. I'm sitting in the office listening to the new Gorillaz and Robert Smith collaboration. The song is not great, but it's Robert Smith. I love Robert Smith.

The first time I ever heard Robert Smith's voice was on a Cure album, The Walk. It was a proper album, like, an album album, vinyl. It was 1984, summer (probably) and I was sitting in my friend Robert's living room. Robert died by suicide years ago--only a scant handful of years later, actually. In my head, those years are compressed. We met in middle school and became friends and went to high school and became better friends. He played the Cure album for me one summer afternoon. We drank and got stoned together and then it all fell apart. He ran away and came back. Ran away and came back. He tried to kill himself by overdosing on over-the-counter medication and he failed. He tried again but used a gun and that time he didn't fail.

Sometimes I think of Robert while I'm working. He was only sixteen when he died, the same age as many of the kids I work with now. (I was fifteen then, the same age as many of the kids I work with now.) That was a lifetime or two ago. The years are slick and we slide right through them, frictionless--but some moments are sticky and some things get stuck in them, don't they? The first time I heard the sound of Robert Smith's voice is stuck and that moment reels out endlessly each time I hear his voice now. The same with my friend Robert. I can hear him laughing--that hoarse joyful laugh of his--at something dumb that we were doing or saying that afternoon and later he happily shared the new music he had discovered with me. That moment is stuck, too, and reeling out endlessly in some way now, each time I clock in and face a group of children who are only here because they have run away and come back and run away and come back and tried to overdose on over-the-counter medication and failed. And sometimes now I think of how what I say to these kids would sound to fifteen-year-old me or sixteen-year-old Robert. I don't know if I'm really able to know anymore, but I try. I say what I can to get them to hang on because he couldn't.

This is a stupid thing to be writing about while I'm working, because now I'm trying not to cry. Trying and failing.

Robert, my friend Robert, would have been fifty years old this month. 

My god. 

He slipped through my fingers and some of these kids will, too, but maybe one or two won't.