Insomnia

Insomnia is a gift, until the next day; until you wake up sputtering and groaning, cursing the sun, cursing your life, your sleep-failing hormones. By that point you've picked up some mediocre book, you're flipping through the pages, awkward and bored out of your mind by a slew of unneccessary words, while, exhausted, you wait for exhaustion.

You wake up at three in the afternoon, and the day is wasted. Your plans have lain out in the sun too long and are now wilting, drooping, parched-out dry, stretching out on the couch like a deflated weather-balloon. You feel groggy, can't go back to sleep, and the clock ticks. Tick, tick, tick; the emptiness of space, the void of time, all things resolving into their accustomed and permanent positions; the fuzzy-beige walls, the wavering light through the window casting a candid, hot, unwelcome streak across your chest. Too groggy to move, but much too up to rest.

But you while away the night hours (while you wait) with intellectual collossi, monuments rising from the gritty dirt of assumption to the towering heights of solecism, solipsism, with fits of conniption thrown in, liberally, for jest. Meanwhile you're shut indoors, crushed by the night like a little piece of fudge glopped in between two dark masses of pudding collididing under a thick glass dome. You're hungry, but you can't eat anything because you've recently brushed; you're tired, but images of the world, inverted in a whirl of panic, dance in front your closed eyelids. Doubts, like the phantasmal outlines of rug-draped furnishings in pale moonlight, trip up your wandering mind; and no matter how many times you reassure yourself, their vague corners and shadowy outlines are always there, palpable as the sharp ends of a cheap-fold out bed through loose-knitting cloth, jabbing your ribs.