mid-night

My eyes refuse to stay closed. The exhaustion, the burn for rest, is defeated by the anxiety, the lack of purpose.

My bare legs kick off the blanket releasing the pocket of warmth from underneath. As the heat rises to the blank dark ceiling above, I press my back against the cool metal of my bed's headboard and wrap my arms around my legs, pulling my knees against my chest.

I close my eyes again but this time fully aware that sleep is not coming this night to time-travel me to morning. It is a journey I will have to make alone, trudging through the moonlit night, the city-lit bedroom until the dull shadowy greens of my tapestry brighten with the first rays of day.

My walls are covered with silly sketches- sketches of abstract designs, hearts and leaves. The lines drawn over and over, repeated, reiterated, until they are dark with the strokes. They bring me comfort without meaning and I look at them with absent pleasure and an ambivalent smile, well an almost smile, sweeps across my face. But it soon vanishes, the evanescent attempt of expression, gone before it could even be seen, forgotten before it could be remembered.

i'm not sad.

i'm numb.

i'm not depressed.

i'm disoriented.

what did i do today?

I primed a canvas black. That was nice.

what did i eat today?

I can't remember.

Am I being too hard on myself?

Why do I feel like I'm wasting time?

It's my time to do what I want with it...

what the hell do I want to be doing with it?

This insomnia is beyond the help of a glass of wine, a hot shower or a warm mug of milk, not that I can ever keep milk in my apartment.

This insomnia runs deep through my blood vessels, pumping questions through the ventricles of my heart.

This insomnia is giving me epic headaches and bags under my eyes that mock me each morning with eternal fatigue.

With the full moon always come tears, frustrating tears and pangs of anguish that give me no answers just full blown emotional catharsis. Only without the release. It ceases only with the daylight and the fresh breeze and the summer sun and the sound of waves crashing on a distant beach.

I push myself back down, so my head is on my pillow. I bring my legs high into the air and find the balance, the release of my lower back. I stay there for what seems like hours but was probably seconds until I let my knees bend and collapse and my legs fall back onto the pile of blankets below. My eyes are still open, staring into the black squares of my curtain. My window is cracked open and I can hear a faint conversation from somewhere else in the building through another open window.

Someone else is not asleep either.

That somehow consoles me enough to close my eyes-

I will fall asleep

I will fall asleep

I will fall asleep

and then I jolt with the sound of my first alarm.

I turn it off, fall asleep for eight minutes and get up with the second.