A Memoir of Fear in Someone Else’s Living Room
Sweetest singing I ever heard. And a feeling like drowning. And eyes...eyes! - Mike Ryerson, Salem's Lot
I know exactly where I was...
five houses up Lincoln Street,
in a living room that smelled
like somebody else’s dinner and carpet cleaner.
Sixteen.
A few days past a birthday.
Lifting weights like muscle could solve things,
hitting people in helmets like nothing could touch me,
now babysitting in bad lighting,
waiting for the house to stop breathing at me.
When the kids finally slept,
I clicked on Salem’s Lot
and found out
Elmira could grow teeth.
A boy floated outside a window
like a balloon that learned to hate.
He smiled at the glass.
He knocked.
Softly.
That’s when my pen started shaking.
Not metaphorically -
my hand.
Actually.
Mike Ryerson sang in a chair
as if dying were a lullaby,
and the sentence drove itself into me:
Sweetest singing I ever heard.
I wrote it down hard enough
to bruise paper.
Then the jail cell.
The dark scratching.
The voice with no body.
A feeling like drowning.
My handwriting collapsed in on itself.
Ink ran.
Letters warped.
The page looked like it had tried to leave.
And the eyes came.
Not the blood.
Not the bites.
The eyes.
They filled the room.
They filled my mouth.
They filled whatever it is you live inside.
I wrote without looking now.
Eyes. Eyes. Eyes.
The words climbed crooked across the page
like they wanted out first.
The letter kept growing,
pages bent under it,
as if paper could carry weight a heart couldn’t.
I wrote to a girl
who didn’t know
she was saving my life.
Every sentence
just something to hold
between my hands.
I kept checking the clock,
waiting for headlights to appear
like cavalry.
They didn’t come early.
They came late.
And when they finally did,
I didn’t say goodnight.
I ran.
Hedges blurred.
Porches leaned in.
Shadows learned my name.
I hit our front door
like a swimmer lifts his mouth
for air.
Inside, my parents were still awake -
two ordinary miracles in bathrobes,
unaware they had just pulled a boy
out of a town with teeth.
I went to bed smelling of ink and fear.
Some people remember trophies.
Some remember mouths.
I remember a pen
moving fast enough to be alive,
a letter in my pocket
like a borrowed heart,
and the sound of it later -
even now -
that scratch in the dark,
trying to make a future
before it was swallowed.
🝀
When I think of that night again,
I see a boy trying very hard to grow up,
trying to look braver than he felt,
trying to make sense of fear with a pen
and of love with a letter
he was too nervous to send.
Funny how life works:
all that effort to be a man,
and the real victory was just making it
back down Lincoln Street
without looking behind me.
Turns out growing up
is mostly learning when to run
and where to run to.
GBS jr
1996
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