HiveComb

Blair

I'm watching Blair go about her day. She's lovely, colourful and exotic, but this bird has a broken wing, only her injury isn't visible.

She struggles with remnants of an unhappy childhood, but outwardly, there are no scars and she appears unblemished, serene and perfect.

And that's the problem—her wounds are all inside, as are mine. That's why we fit together and why we break apart.

"You two are golden," Zach reassures me, but he's my friend who tells me lies. I know the drill very well—they’re the same lies I tell myself.

We're sitting in the quadrangle outside the college and I can see Blair through the windows lecturing on Victorian Literature.

Don't get me wrong, we could be golden if I could only solve the problem of us. That's partly the reason why I'm going to a sleep clinic, trying to deal with fears that cause me night terrors.

Right now I'm trying to learn a technique called lucid dreaming the clinic says will help me heal and overcome the distress that's disturbing my sleep at night.

I hope it works.

Zach walks me back to my car.

I've known him since we were freshmen at U of T and now he lectures in psychology on the opposite side of the university from Blair, but you can imagine the campus gossip that goes on between them whenever Blair and I double with Zach and Mitzy, his wife.

Me? I'm the outsider. I'm no academic, 'just a hack writer’— that's what I say when asked what I do for a living. For me, it's not a job nor even a profession—it’s a calling, like being a prophet and you can't refuse it because it's difficult and you can't do it just to pay a bill.

My whole day it seems is one long series of dialogues with characters I'm writing and other voices inside my head. But occasionally, I make time for me and discover I have a voice and a point of view, but it's usually submerged under the weight of these other worlds, jostling me to the back of the line.

"Must be nice to have the whole day to yourself," Zach sighs ruefully as he heads back into an afternoon of lectures topped off with a predictably interminable department meeting before the gods that preside over academia release him, so he can return tomorrow and go through it again.

"I don't live the bohemian lifestyle you imagine," I chuckle, knowing my time is my own, until it isn’t—and once that publisher's deadline arrives, you'd better be ready or be permanently finished.

It's a different pressure than Zach experiences—and that's why he daydreams and why I have nightmares.

Blair and I aren't married...yet, but we are engaged. I guess the word that best describes our relationship would be turbulent. I blame myself for much of it. I'm not always emotionally available.

Because of her own troubled past, sometimes she struggles and breaks down under the stress. I'm embarrassed to admit but sometimes she's quietly crying and I don't even notice. How can that be? I think there's just too much going on inside of me and her hurt gets drowned out by other voices.

So yeah, Zach's right--I have lots of time for myself, but it's taken up with a myriad of people inside me competing for attention. What did Hamlet say? O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.

Yeah, that about sums up my day.