Insomnia

The average adult needs about eight hours of sleep a night or so they say. If I get four i'm lucky, there are few situations in life that make you this contemplative.

Drinking mead with another perceptive soul, for example. Smoking cigarettes on a first date, that moment at night before you fall asleep, holding someone's life or future in your hands, hearing the quiet whisper of the Spirit, having a loved one be angry with you and insomnia.

We are everywhere. We roam the streets. Our eyes are open but part of us is missing. We remember the dreams we have in those brief moments of sleep we manage to achieve and we wonder if this is all but a dream. We see life through a dull filter of narcissism and regret but somehow it seems to weed out that which doesn't matter. The important things in life are magnified and the petty squabbles are nothing but a buzzing insect in our ears. Our past feels like the life of another. The present some kind of futile pursuit of megalomania. The future a decayed land of inflicted apathy.

The quiet haunting of the soul drowns out the sounds all around. To be alive is a rarity. There is opera in the air. Chanting, wailing voices all around. 

Singing, screaming a wretched noise reminding me of my illness. Silence is an ever-allusive catchphrase. The knife flashes and now I ran bleeding. I stare at the blood, but why can't feel it? I stretch out my arms and cry to the wind to take me away. I am up there on the cross with a glance to my left and to my right the faces of the broken. They are mocking me, but their faces are my own. I have stolen nothing in my life, nothing except for what he gave to me. It was not mine to take. But I'm in distress. The one I love, I hear his anguish for me.

My head is spinning as conduct this grand chorus. I can see my evil grin as the chords bend under my will.

This symphony is mine to direct as I please. But my inspiration had fled like a ship in a raging storm. So I drop my arms and the music stops. Once again the hideous roar of silence encompasses me, it overwhelms the desire to tap into that stream again.

That river of supernatural extravaganza that flows through my brain like an undulating wave of power.

What am I talking about. I am but a mere child, a lost little girl who doesn't remember what it is like to hold the hand of a loving parent. A kid who has lost faith in the words "Everything will be okay." Spinning around in circles, falling to the ground running but ending up in the same place crawling, scratching, dreaming, biting, cutting, clawing, reaching, failing to breathe, breathing stale air, shivering, not shivering anymore, stabbing feeling in my heart beat, but not believing in the simplicity of the five senses, collapsing, flying for a moment only to fall that much farther. I'm bleeding, trusting, believing, doubting, listening, hearing, not understanding, praying, crying out, shaking my fist in defiance, raising my head, raising my voice, hearing thoughts of others, ignoring my own, dancing, twirling in a luminescent sea of chaos, trying to overcome this overwhelming decline, skipping, tripping, laughing, crashing, flailing, maiming, healing, maiming, healing, hurting, restoring, hurting, restoring....

Need go on?