Insomnia

3:06AM

The insomnia hours are by far the strangest – fast, break-neck fast and chronically slow at the same time. If time is indeed relative then it makes sense that these hours wizz and trickle by in equal cruelty. The house of night, of sleep, at least when all the world sleeps – slips through your fingers as you try to chase the last hours of rest. These hours until the morning, of sunrise, of another day, possibly a better day, remain out of reach. Covered by the mist of burning eyes, slow movements and infomercials. Waiting for the moment when the biological need for sleeps trumps the endless stream of thoughts flowing through the body. Is it these thoughts that keep the body awake – min over matter but decidedly not the way the idiom envisions. The mind steps me from sleeping – it is the start and the end of all my problems, of all that I am, ever was or ever could be. The mind holds my greatest achievements, all the potential and every downfall. Isn’t that thought both liberating and terrifying – how do people sleep at all?

What keeps me awake? My driving emotions of guilt, inadequacy, ambition, fear, loneliness, worry (especially about the aforementioned emotions). I’ve told myself stories as long as I can remember. Especially falling asleep – short stories where things are happy or at least stories where the complications were solvable and the crippling fear not my own. Little scenes that make be believe or at least trick my brain into thinking that, if even only in a dream, things can be safe and warm – understandable.

Stories are comforting; a beginning, a middle and an end. Neatly and with a bow. Life doesn’t always happen like that. In fact it almost never is. A middle can transition into a beginning almost without notice. Three beginnings and collide with a separate cohort of ends – in an infinite series of changes, moments, beats.

Stories are comforting; a collective conscious moment. A moment in time or space or even memory when two things touch. When two minds converge – when a memory of a story changes a current interpretation.

Stories are comforting; they can show you how common your feelings are. Seeing your life encapsulated in thoughts or words can bolster your courage to face the world.

Stories are comforting; they can take you away from the complications of life. From time, from earth, from all the certainties of physics.

Stories are comforting for as long as we allow them to reside in our imagination. I hope the day never comes when I wish them away in the hope of fleeting sleep.

4:37AM

And with that I shall leave you with a thought from somebody else and a photograph from me.

“I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I’m awake, you know?” – Ernest Hemingway

~ by unspecifiedrihan on June 4, 2012.