Something about 3 AM

I present to you: Jordano a la Jessica. There's not very much dialogue, because I don't trust myself to write up to Jordano's freaking awesome dialogue standard. Let me tell you, this was possibly the most difficult thing I've ever written.
I apologise in advance for my massacre of your style, Jordano.

Two nights ago, I couldn’t sleep. I pulled open my bedroom window and managed to wedge myself through the opening, out onto the snow-covered roof. It must’ve been about 3am, and I had expected some stars or at least the occasional plane, but there wasn’t anything in the sky, just the dim haze of light pollution and smog. We moved from the city when I was a kid, but I think it followed us out, or at least the city sky did. There isn’t any flashing signage and the trees have replaced the skyscrapers, but the sky is a city sky, dark and starless.

I stood for a while, and then my legs got tired, so I tried crouching. Crouching made my body a lot less cold, but after a while my thighs were burning and my ankles felt like they would give out any second, so I gave in and half-heartedly brushed myself a clear patch of roof to sit down on.

It’s crazy, how at 3am on a roof, with your ass freezing off and no stars in the sky, all you can think of is how much you want to smoke. It had been a week, at that point, since I’d quit, but I reached back through the window into my room, anyway, and thought, What the fuck. Might as well as I grabbed my pack and my lighter from the windowsill. I’d shoved them there when I decided for the sixteenth time to stop smoking for real this time. My windowsill is pretty accessible, but usually when I’m anywhere near the window, I’m opening it with my mom yelling at the door about how stuffy my room is. It’s her fault, I tell her every time, for owning such a fucking tiny house.

I don’t smoke because it’s an addiction, I think, but because I like it. Elliot calls it the lazy man’s masturbation, because you manage to satisfy a craving and have something between your fingers at the same time, and you don’t really have to work for it. The first time he said that, we all laughed, mostly for the implication about the size of his dick, but now I think we all agree with him to some extent. Dean has some fancy psychology explanation about oral fixation and childhood, but we don’t like it as much. Whatever the reason, smoking is still right on the top of my list of things I like to do. I think, if I were on death row, I’d definitely ask for a last smoke before they injected me or strapped me to an electric chair.

Sometimes I think about that, about what it’d be like to be on death row, knowing that there was no going back, and having your death scheduled. Most people I know are afraid of death because you never know when it’ll hit you, but if you know when you’re going to die, and you have time to sort everything out, say your goodbyes – are you still afraid of death, then?
I asked a girl that once, when we were stuck waiting for one of those night buses in the East End that just never comes.

“I don’t really know,” she said, clicking the bright pink plastic beads of her necklace through her fingers. “What about what comes afterwards? I’d still be afraid of that, I think.”

“Really? Are you religious?”

“Not technically. I mean, my family is – the whole go to church thing, right? My mom’s really into that – but I don’t really think I believe in all of that.”

She had this cute crinkle thing going on between her eyebrows, right underneath those thick bangs that were everywhere last summer. I guess philosophical discussions at bus stops really got to her. The next thing I knew, she’d turned to me – I saw a strip of bluish lace under her cardigan – and said, “The bus won’t come forever, probably. I’ve been here for like an hour already, and it’s missed the last two scheduled runs. There’s a 24-hour Tim Horton’s nearby, do you want to grab a coffee with me and wait out the metro?”

I was thinking of her, two nights ago on the roof. Her name was Patricia or Priscilla or something like that, and she talked more than anybody I’ve ever met. It was too quiet, at 3am, and I guess I just really wanted someone to talk to, so I pretended she was there with me. I almost offered her a cigarette, until I remembered that she didn’t smoke. I just let her talk inside my head instead, trying to think about what she might have said.

I figured she probably would have said it was too cold to talk, which got me thinking again. What if you were lost in the woods with someone, and it started snowing or icing or something, and you had nothing to do, would you still say it was too cold to talk, and just sit there being miserable together? What if you thought you were going to die? Wouldn’t you want to get everything out before you croaked?

I think I think about death too much. But it’s a big hang-up for me, the way we act towards death. I guess that’s why I started thinking of that girl from the bus stop. She thought the same as everyone else I’ve ever met, scared of death for whatever reason, but for all she knew, as she told me over coffee and Boston cream doughnuts, I could’ve been a murdering rapist, and even talking to me could’ve earned her the trip to the afterlife that scared her so much.