Flat Out

For Eckles, who fell off a ladder and hurt his back (dopey git!), here's something to occupy you while you get better.

We'll do it all. Everything . On our own.

We don't need. Anything. Or anyone

If I lay here. If I just lay here
Would you lie with me and just forget the world?

I don't quite know. How to say. How I feel

Those three words. Are said too much. They're not enough

If I lay here. If I just lay here
Would you lie with me and just forget the world?

Forget what we're told . Before we get too old
Show me a garden that's bursting into life

Let's waste time. Chasing cars. Around our heads

I need your grace. To remind me. To find my own

If I lay here. If I just lay here
Would you lie with me and just forget the world?

Forget what we're told. Before we get too old
Show me a garden that's bursting into life

All that I am. All that I ever was
Is here in your perfect eyes, they're all I can see

I don't know where. Confused about how as well.
Just know that these things will never change for us at all

If I lay here. If I just lay here.
Would you lie with me and just forget the world?

- Snow Patrol

I can see through ceilings.

I can see trough ceilings and walls and rooftops until I see the sky. The sky is always blue and the clouds are always fluffy billowing cotton balls and the sun shines every day. It's all out there beyond that bloody ceiling and I can see it, every bit of it.

I watch the stars and stare at the same silvery moon I know you're looking at every night. Only your night is my day and my day your night. We never look at that moon at the same time.

But it passes on your messages to me every night. I see where you stared into it until your eyes burned and I can feel your love radiating from it as it lights my darkened room in the early hours. I find it's shape through my bloody ceiling and I try to find an image of you in the craters and dry seas that give shade and character to its perfect featureless face. I remember you once explained to me that perfect things aren't nearly as hypnotic as things with flaws. You said that true beauty lay in flaws and you pointed to the moon and its craters and told me how dull it would be if it was perfectly smooth and snow white. You pointed to the ripples on the lake and said they were hypnotic in a way a perfectly smooth lake could never be.

You stroked your hand up my arm and told me that my freckles were sunlit days and lazy afternoons and stories and history and an ever-changing map of my life.

I was always fascinated by your perfectly milky white skin and cursed my blemishes. I thought they were messy and ugly and like specks of dirt on a pristine canvass. Nobody wants to make art out of a dirty canvass after all do they?

You shoved me over and called me an idiot.

"What do you think paint is you fool? Paint is dirt on a previously pristine canvass. You're a ready-made work of art. There's no more work to be done. I love every single one of them."

The moon has craters and I have freckles. You have uncontrollable hair and a single pebble dropping in the middle of a lake will send ripples outward until they travel all the way to the bank side. The perfection of a pearl only exists because of a piece of dirt getting in the way...an imperfection creates its own perfection.

I hate my ceiling. It gets in my way. It's perfectly smooth and white and there's nothing to look at, no shadows to be cast in different light, and no faces or patterns to be found that only my eye can see. I want to see the sky and the clouds and the stars and the moon. I want my universal flaws back.

I want you back.

I can't come to get you. I can't get out of this bloody bed. I can't see through the ceiling and I can't read your messages on the moon.

You went away to try to find a way to fix me but what's so wrong with being broken? Wasn't it you who taught me that?

Something went wrong and I'm on my back all day and all night.

Something went wrong and a grain of sand got into an oyster and aggravated it.

Something went wrong and there's now a huge crater on the surface of the moon.

Something went wrong and one of the stars I see isn't even there anymore by the time its light travels across the universe and hits my eyes.

But I can see it shining brightly. I can see faces and pictures and shadows in the moon. I can give you a pearl that I found when we went diving together. I can wriggle my toes.

This morning a spider crawled across my foot and I freaked out and wriggled my toes.

Stop looking for a solution and come back and blow away my ceiling again, blow the roof clean off St Mungo's. Come back and keep me company as I lay flat on my back and try to occupy myself while I find a way of rotating my foot and then bending my knees and then sitting up for the first time in ages.

Come home and find constellations in my freckles.

I don't need a miracle. I just need you.