Oh I can't sleep.

I know it isn't even quite one, but I can tell by the buzz under my skin, the hum in my head, its not going to happen.
Between 3 and 6 am I hate hotels. In a building full of people, you're completely alone. In the dark and the quiet, the room becomes an island. Nothing exists outside, and if that was comforting before, when I first got here, its awful now, with my head full of nightmares and no one familiar breathing deeply on the couch, or turning over upstairs, or snoring faintly through the floorboards.
I miss my boys.
I miss lying in my little bed under the stairs, drifting in the smoke between asleep and dreams. Hearing Stephen's key in the lock, the shudder of the front door closing behind him. He comes over and sits down, sometimes with his coat still on, and tells me about his day, or a funny thing he heard, or the last thing he was thinking of before the bar got rushed. Sometimes he sings a snatch of a song that is stuck in his brain and asks me to identify it.
Whatever happens after that, weather he goes upstairs to bed, or settles on the couch to watch a few episodes of M.A.S.H., weather I get up with him and we smoke and talk, or he goes out again to meet someone, weather I stay up the rest of the night, or fall into a fitful sleep, hearing those sounds, his key in the lock, his low voice in the dark, it make me think everyone everywhere that I love is for the moment safe and sleepy, and my chest doesn't feel so pressed and heavy.

I miss Robbie in the mornings. I am always awake when he wakes up, but I lay under the covers with my head in the pillow and pretend I could slip back to sleep just any second. He comes downstairs trying to be so so quiet. He thinks I am asleep as he tries to tiptoe past and not crash into anything, and I smile to myself. He makes a quiet racket setting up the coffee machine and then he goes back upstairs.
When he comes down again I say, "Hi baby," in my smiley sleepy voice, and he gives me a quick hug and grabs coffee and goes to work, or else he crawls in bed and cuddles for 5 seconds before he makes me get up and play with him.
Robbie the sun, and Stephen the moon. In this way I divide my days.
Except now I live in hotels, and when I go back to home, I have my own apartment, and a big bed, and a room with a door and everything.
But I miss them.