Insomnia

Once again I find myself unable to sleep. The old enemy is back. That familiar feeling, the slow creeping procession of the nightly hours…the dreaded silence of the desolate pitch. The room shifts around me, like some hefty beast stalking its prey, oh that it would pounce and devour me! Any release from this state, caught between two worlds, lost in a realm of silent noises and shadowy flights of imagination. I find myself witness to a strange conversation, two men argue over a lost prize, evidently they were to share the bounty, but have hidden it so well that neither can recall where it lies. A woman walks past a window, her head tilted to the sky, she stops and stands waiting as though she is listening, I do not hear anything. Images swirl through my mind like sand in an hourglass. Each one slips away, not to be remembered, merely repeated again, when the glass flips. I close my eyes, or perhaps they have been closed all along? The blackness prevents the comforting familiarity of my rooms’ shapes from disclosing themselves. I could move, reach for a light, a lamp or a candle, I could open the heavy curtain that shields the moon from view, but I don’t. Like the drapes I hang inert, suspended in a sea of blackness, unable to let either world fully lay claim to me. Up, down, front, behind, inside and out, all have lost meaning, just words, far removed from the cold semi-reality that grips me. Again I see faces, hear sounds. A group of people gather round me, their blank faces are unrecognisable, they chatter in tongues. I strain to hear their words, but all I hear is the slow and steady thud of my heartbeat…the blood throbs now in my ears, so loud it’s deafening. Nothing will stop it, god its getting louder and louder, I long for my heart to stop, for it to burst within its bony cage, or for some unseen weight to dash out my brain, anything to make this beating stop! I scream, I wail like a mad thing possessed. My howl reaches up to the stars and beyond, the primal fury of a thousand sleepless nights, the crazed anguish of that slow steady beating silence, the black, cold, creeping tightness of my endless night.

I scream until, exhausted, I collapse back into my waiting sheets.

I sleep like an infant.