I slept for all of twenty minutes.
I'm not sure what woke me. Perhaps a random noise from outside. Perhaps I was too warm. Perhaps my body was telling me that twenty minutes had simply been long enough.
I had been on my back. I rolled over onto my right side in the darkness and once again closed my eyes, only my left eye kept fluttering open against my will, staring at the bedside table and the wall. I forced it to remain closed, cleared my mind and waited for sleep to once again embrace me.
I realized I was staring at the wall again. Fuck.
Twenty more minutes passed. I tossed and turned, wide awake. Twenty minutes turned into forty-five, which turned into an hour.
I flipped the television on and tried again, hoping that the noises of the forensics program now permeating the room would be enough to quell the noises of my racing mind. Instead, I found myself, eyes now (finally!) fully closed, contemplating various facets of ways to hide evidence in addition to the non-muffled noises of my mind.
I opened my eyes.
Stared at the wall some more.
Finally I sat up, wrapped my comforter around myself rather than resigning myself to the fact that this elusive fucking creature called sleep wasn't returning any time soon and actually putting clothes on, and walked out of my bedroom.
And here I sit, nude inside of my down comforter, doing absolutely nothing but reading depressing poetry and rambling on about shit nobody will care about. Because it's after 2:30 in the fucking morning, and I can't sleep. Again.
I'm awake, and I'm a bottle of fucking angst right now because of it.
Tread carefully.
Insomniac The night is only a sort of carbon paper, Blueblack, with the much-poked periods of stars Letting in the light, peephole after peephole -- A bonewhite light, like death, behind all things. Under the eyes of the stars and the moon's rictus He suffers his desert pillow, sleeplessness Stretching its fine, irritating sand in all directions. Over and over the old, granular movie Exposes embarrassments--the mizzling days Of childhood and adolescence, sticky with dreams, Parental faces on tall stalks, alternately stern and tearful, A garden of buggy rose that made him cry. His forehead is bumpy as a sack of rocks. Memories jostle each other for face-room like obsolete film stars. He is immune to pills: red, purple, blue -- How they lit the tedium of the protracted evening! Those sugary planets whose influence won for him A life baptized in no-life for a while, And the sweet, drugged waking of a forgetful baby. Now the pills are worn-out and silly, like classical gods. Their poppy-sleepy colors do him no good. His head is a little interior of grey mirrors. Each gesture flees immediately down an alley Of diminishing perspectives, and its significance Drains like water out the hole at the far end. He lives without privacy in a lidless room, The bald slots of his eyes stiffened wide-open On the incessant heat-lightning flicker of situations. Nightlong, in the granite yard, invisible cats Have been howling like women, or damaged instruments. Already he can feel daylight, his white disease, Creeping up with her hatful of trivial repetitions. The city is a map of cheerful twitters now, And everywhere people, eyes mica-silver and blank, Are riding to work in rows, as if recently brainwashed. -- Sylvia Plath
