Sleeping awake

SleepingAwake : by Harris Potamitis

Sometimes you imagine your self awake, but most of the time you’re dreaming, that’s how my mind translates it; someone described like ‘sleeping awake’.

You’re fed up with your self, your family, your friends, and your girlfriend dumped you; now that’s a life! You come home from work, you see the same things hanging around, stigmatizing your pathetic life, and then hopeless you collapse on the bed because your day was long and tiring. The next morning you wake up with difficulty, because the hours you slept didn’t satisfy your needs and so on the story repeats it’s self over and over again. Its starting to get on your nerves, inside your blood, this ‘parade’ that never stops. And while you’re doing all that, you begin to wonder, you begin to understand.

Soon this thing drives you crazy, insane, it’s taking everything away from you, leaving you in the center of a life which is about to collapse, combined with a life which is about to be reborn. Then you begin to make agreements with your self, hoping to find a solution in things which soon need to be taken care of; you realize you don’t have any time to lose, not anymore!

Other times when you feel that you’re awake and fine, you could testify that; ‘this might be a good day to fix my world, the way I want it to look like’. Temporary happiness surrounds you along with enthusiastic intentions. Within moments you realize it’s a pretty dam good idea, you are transfigured. Then a sound emerges from the living room, it’s the phone. And you think; ‘If I answer the phone, there is a pretty good possibility to return to my miserable life again, (just because someone else is going to remind you of it), but if I don’t answer it, I guess am extending the unexpected’. Time passes and until you decide what to do, the phone stops. You think; ‘I guess I’m extending the unexpected’.

Then while you’re hiding your self from the world, so that you can live your own ‘dream’, the world is desperately looking for you, to hunt you down like a deer in the woods, which got lost in the storm. Then you’re thinking to move out, disappear, vanish from their faces, which seek and haunt you. In days they are out of control, because they lost control of you. They show up at your door, banging it as hard and as loud for you to open, and they introduce fear in your life once again. It’s not just one who’s looking for you, it is many, hungry lions screaming out your name in anger, but you remain still, in a box with dimensions two by two, locked inside your nest; you don’t seem to be bothered to open the door; after-all you know best what will they say!

Finally when they leave, you crawl out of your shell, and you’re back in your hall, with the same old things hanging around. During the week the bills slide under your door, eventually multiplying, and multiplying. That’s when you make the final decision, when you accept, that you’re no longer the person you used to be. You find your self a mask, and a different name, you start calling your self ‘The inkhorn’, just a name you picked up from a book. And all that just to escape, to be unrecognisable, and finally alone!

Although, after some time, the door brakes down, and ‘they’ find you. Within days you’re changed again, you sink into ‘reality’, while all you thoughts and dreams fly away. You are depressed again. You look at the time, you realize its Monday, you need to be at work by half past seven, and the same story begins all over again. Then you hear the manager saying to you in vain; ‘In this office I demand discipline and I need you to be here on time!’ Then you realize you’re late for work again. You heard him saying; ‘it is because you stay out late and don’t get much sleep, how can you do that to your self’? The truth was though, that it was something else which was keeping you awake, something inside you, unseen, and not some blond girl’s body swinging along a metal post. It was ‘the inkhorn’….

It’s almost midnight and you’re trying to get some sleep, within moments you do. But suddenly you find you’re self in the same room, the same bed, the same furniture. You could have never imagined that you where sleeping, no, because you felt awake. You walked through the corridor, past the toilet into the room where the mirror was, and without putting much thinking into it you sit your self on the bed in front of the wooden framed mirror. That’s when you find out the truth, because you are looking at it. Staring at it, so clear, so silent ‘she’ is. You begin strange conversations with the man in the mirror, sentences without a logical explanation, random feelings and thoughts emerge from deep inside you. You agree with your self in some matters but in others you are completely different. It’s getting you, it fucks you up when you dream about it, just because you know you cannot escape from it, and maybe, if perhaps someone wakes you up suddenly, and you understand where you are, and what you’re doing, maybe you can then become ‘the inkhorn’; I’d say, that’s maybe when you realize that you and me live the same exact life, you could even claim, that we are even the same Person……

…hello it’s Monday and today I am going to be Harris.