Sing Me to Sleep
My mother used to sing me songs when I was too afraid to sleep. One was about girls who picked flowers. They grew up and married boys who went off to war. When the boys died, they were buried, and from their graves grew flowers.
***
I want to tell you this story without having to confess anything. I want to tell you this story without having to be in it. Mea in nighttime clothes when the sun burns brightly in the morning, Mea at a party, high again. Mea in the headlights, blue like a lighter flame.
You covered my body with your body and now I am marred. The minutes don’t stop. They tick and tick and tick and tick.
I want to be thrown over, possessed, to tell you this story. I’m surprised to be telling you anything at all.
You made my body punishment for itself.
***
Is it vulgar to think of my space between my legs as a gash? Is it cliché to call it a wound? What is the origin of my injury?
***
He had blue eyes, cerulean, so I wanted to sleep with him. I could see the way his muscles worked beneath the leather of his jacket, could understand the fact of his pulse. I wanted to dive my body headfirst into his, like a car crash. I wanted to be wanted, and he was very beautiful.
We kissed with our eyes open, groped for each other outside of a bar, as the roads around us grew glossy with ice and our breath softened the air, lacing it white.
In his apartment, we were animals, our skin barely kept us inside. It only felt good while moving. It wasn’t until we were past the middle of it when dull pain slipped in between the center of my ribs, the one that said this means nothing, and so do I. It was the sense of being smothered. I felt like swallowing mud. The smell of blood, the taste of it on his lip from where I bit down. He didn’t say ouch, he liked it. I wanted to hurt him back. Hurt him the way he didn’t know he was hurting me.
When he was spent, he wanted me to stay the night, but I was sleepless. I pulled on my clothes and boots and stood in his doorway. I whispered I was sorry about the blood in his mouth. How I wished it was mine, but he was already out cold, and no one heard me.
***
You opened my mouth and filled it with stones. Once I could say I’d never kissed anyone. Once that was true.
***
All those hours given over to basking in the neon glow of an imagined future, white powder keyed into my nose, of being carried away in streams of promise so strong that I felt altered forever and convinced that the smallest particle of the surrounding world was charged with purpose of impossible grandeur. I looked up into the winter worn trees, and was thrilled by their nakedness, by their icy jewels, and the melodious singing of fellow night followers. Sparks in my heart, like fireflies, sparks in my brain, like fireflies, sparks all inside me, lit up, then grew dark, only to light up again, and again, and again, until night’s end.
***
There are so many things I want to tell you. That this skin is not my skin, these hands not my hands. I don’t sing in the shower anymore, don’t sing anywhere at all, not like I used to. In the shower one morning, I let the water shine down, dance on me, like a rain drenched waterlily in a pond. I was the shadow to the lamplight in the bathroom.
Too much coke the night prior, too bright like over-whitened teeth. Too much to bear, so I sat down in the tub, a dim lit riverbed, let the water gesture over my shoulders, let the droplets bounce off like birds in flight. Pigeons cooed outside the grimy window, under cover of devastating clouds. They were my song.
I swallowed my own heart and spit it up into the drain. I grabbed for it and swallowed it back down again. Still, it wanted to crawl out of my mouth and escape the things I’d done to my body, the things I’d let loose in my mind. It made a scratching sound in my throat, that’s my song now, and I know you know where the sound is coming from, truly.
***
I thought cocaine was a more than adequate distraction from the war I was fighting inside myself. But really, it wasn’t. We were all dying, my so-called friends and I, but some more than most.
***
There was another song my mother used to sing. It was about carousels:
And the seasons, they go round and round
And the painted ponies go up and down
We're captive on the carousel of time
We can't return, we can only look
Behind, from where we came
And go round and round and round, in the circle game
***
One night, as I wandered from one bar to the next, I let some of my thoughts fall out of my head and land on the sidewalk behind me. I hoped someone might speak to them. But like every piece of litter along the curb, my thoughts were passed by, either invisible or ignored.
***
That summer, my friend Patti tried to kill herself. I’d met her early on in my out-all-night binge. She called me from an ICU in Brooklyn, asked me to bring some clothes from her apartment. I opened her bedroom door to an overwhelming smell of vomit. I covered my nose and mouth with both hands. Patti had thrown up all over her bed. On her nightstand sat a half empty bottle of red wine, her sheets were stained a rusty bile brown. Partially dissolved pills, an entire prescription worth, littered the bed and floor. There were so many pills. For days after, the pills were all I could think about. There were so many pills. So. Many. Pills.
In Patti’s hospital room, I sat with her on the bed, combed her knotted hair, chattered on about nothing, anything not to think about the scene of her room, the pills.
A few nights after that, I cried in the park near my apartment. The trees offered me no comfort, so I called Nina from a secluded bench.
She really wanted to die, I sobbed into the phone. I mean, she really wanted to die.
***
Laying in my bed, alone, my high fading, I thought about the one summer, in the East Village, a night with someone nice. Remembered what it felt like to lie next to him late in the evening, nightcaps sinking us both into the sheets. The complete ease, the contentedness, the humbling feeling of lying there still and naked. The windows open and screenless, a gentle humidity cradled the room. How all this lulled the blood of my veins into a syrupy sleepy state. The yellow from a lamp post, or someone else’s apartment, the last light holding me awake. The perfection of that feeling, its unbeatability.
But remembering this beautiful moment alone, the thought of suicide flickered through my mind, and I fought with a question. Could beauty be a weight gifted to sustain me? Could it be enough? How strong was my grip? Could I hold onto it?
***
Sometimes when I wanted to die, I’d think about Patti’s bedroom, the red-brown stain on the sheets, the pills scattered like loose teeth. I wondered what I’d leave behind, if I’d ever leave you behind.
***
Once, Patti and I took an early morning bus out to Montauk to meet some men she’d met only a couple of times before. We hadn’t been to sleep in two days and before boarding the bus, we snorted what was left of a bag of coke.
We spent half the long ride furiously trying to memorize Dylan Thomas’ “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.” After a while, the coke wore off, and Patti passed out. I reapplied my mascara in a hand mirror as the bus bumped up and down. She didn’t really want to take the bus out to Montauk, I had to convince her to go. I wanted an adventure, and I was good at getting what I wanted.
I watched her sleep, her head leaned against the window, jostling a bit with the bus’s turbulence, and I felt a bit sorry.
I snapped a photo of her in a moment of peace. She looked like an angel, past the bruise-colored circles under her eyes. I checked my hand mirror again to see my circles matched hers.
Later, with the two strange men, after having done more bumps of coke and some mushrooms for good measure, we hit a party at a beach bar. Someone took a photo of Patti and I lounging around with beers in our hands.
I saw the photo a few days after. While we were both undeniably beautiful, we were also tinged with grey and blue and purple, two sleepless drugged out girls, on an adventure, pretending to be living.
***
A year later, I’d pulled myself together some. Whatever that means. To me, it means I stopped trying to forget myself, stopped trying to disappear. In a dumpling restaurant in Chinatown, Patti asked, You really think I’m an addict.
I said, I really do.
You barely drink anymore, she said. Maybe you’re just comparing my using to your lack of.
I said, When I used to use, like really use, remember last summer? It made me feel closer to killing myself. Made it feel easier, like a readily available option.
She said, I feel like that when I don’t use.
That’s how I know you’re an addict, I said. I use to bring me closer to death. You use to veer away from it.
***
At a party, Patti stood beside me for years, or was it a moment? I cannot remember. Maybe I loved her, maybe I didn’t. There was an apartment, and then no apartment. There was a train, and then no train at all. When no one remembers, was it there? You, whose moments are gone, who drifts like smoke in the afterlife, tell me something, tell me anything.
***
Before the conversation about addiction with Patti ever happened, Chinatown, in front of my building, I cried. Every sharp breath keyed a quick pain in my lip where the winter air had split the skin. The neighborhood smelled like chimney smoke, and it reminded me of home.
Earlier in the evening I had passed by a couple, a man and a woman not much older than myself. They were holding hands at the edge of the sidewalk, staring at a garbage truck chewing up old office furniture. They smiled.
I sought out a trash bag dumped on the sidewalk, tried to smile like that couple. But every time I spread my mouth the split in my lip began to bleed.
Somewhere, in another neighborhood, a mother tucked her daughter into bed, sang a lullaby, kissed her head.
-Mea Cohen
Born and raised in Palisades, NY, Mea Cohen is a writer now based in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Her work has appeared in West Trade Review, OKAY Donkey, Big Whoopie Deal, Barely South Review, and more. She was nominated for best micro-fiction in 2024 and 2026. She earned her MFA in creative writing and literature from Stony Brook University, where she was a Contributing Editor for The Southampton Review. She is the Founder and Editor in Chief for The Palisades Review.