The Insomniac

Awake? Not really.




Asleep? Nope.




What's the phrase the kids use? Fuck if I know...to be totally honest I'm dying inside. I got this anxious feeling... all the time, like everything I say bounces off of people... like my words are being made redundant.

The vocabulary I once knew is dying around me... shortened to phrases far faster but far less palatable. Abbreviations for two syllable words that are easier to say without the shortening.

Corner of my eyes... corner of the room... the lights that burst and flash as my brain tells my body to sleep, my eyes shake and the lights just sit and stare at me, from the corner of my mind.

The cold creeps in, and my bones seize up, the nimble fingers stricken with a stiff sense of depression and suspect old age not too far. Not too far but never too close.

When you're ten, twenty is old, and when you're eighty, ninety is old. Age and relevance are intertwined as the mind shuts down whether old age takes it, or the sleep that we yearn.

Can I sit in my bed and think? While away the hours, as the neon lights from the shop across the road flitter and twitch, the bittersweet flash of a cheap bargain.

Too many thoughts and not enough time, to find that corner of my mind, where the sleep long lingers, and waits to creep, upon these young cold bones.

The mind races more when my head hits the pillow, and the feather wraps its warm caressing hands around my tormented mind, coaxing it into relaxing, if but for a second.

Shoulders tensing, and my feet... my feet freeze in the shoes that I have not taken off since I got in. The half empty pack of Marlborough rest on the side, begging for me to indulge in at least one sick fantasy tonight, unaware of the dangers it brings, I suck the air in, through a poisonous little stick, which brings me to the maker.

Have you ever sat up and thought 'Am I dead?' Maybe waking midway through a dream, or worse still, a memory. That feeling of almost relief as if dying wasn't half as hard as you thought it would be, as the never ending sleep has embraced you, and warmed those young cold bones.

Well that is not my place, and I will not reside in a place not built for me. No... I shall have to live with the knowledge that without sleep I cannot live, doomed to roam in this place I call limbo. Moving from one thing to another, merely surviving, and waiting to get to the next day, to hope for a chance to sleep.

I often wonder what it would be like, to relax and live a normal life. To go to sleep and wake refreshed, and look forward to a day of life, not a day of living... surviving for the sake of being scared to die.

I am an insomniac, I cannot live without sleep, but if I sleep, I shall cease to be that which I have made myself, and therefore cease to be.

So until the time when I can count the sheep, that wait on the greener side of the fence, I'll just sit and wait with flashing lights, from the corner of my eyes. Sit and wait from the corner of my mind, till my young cold bones cease to tell the tale of the young boy, trapped in the body of that which ceased to be.

I am an insomniac; I am neither dead nor alive. I survive, because I am afraid to go to sleep. I am afraid to meet my maker. When time ceases to be though, and the maker is no more, I shall feel most at home as nothing, because without sleep, I may as well be nothing.