Insomniack

Insomniack
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I just wanna be left alone, mostly. I can't remember if that's how I started out, or did the idea of it grow on me, like a fungus?

When you're awake for a long long long time, you start to change inside of the moment. To shift. The what it is that's you, or in my case, me, shunts over a little to the left and backward one notch. Then I get to view the happenings of the world around me from that unique position. It's a strange and weirdly thing.

It's a massive shift in the way I experience things, but it doesn't really affect my outward appearance or mannerisms that much. I seem slower and stupider, is all... but to me, it's imminently more stranger.

I can't explain what it feels like, to have your mode shifted from normal to weird, just because of being awake and awake and awake. It's like you've become an alternate you. Or that I've become an alternate me. It's one of those had to have been there things, I guess.

A lot of the time, when I can sleep like a normal person, a normal person, then, when I'm all slept out, I really, really, want to sleep, sleep, some more. The idea of getting up and having to be awake seems like this heavy, heavy thing. The idea of simple consciousness feels like a lead blanket. Like those poor, hell-bent figures from Dante's Inferno, who had to wear those heavy cloaks that were lined with gold ingots, while they walked endlessly through hell.

I fascinate myself, that I feel this way. What the heck happened to me that made a normal awakening from sleep seem like a normal awakening into hell? It wasn't always this way, and that makes the phenomenon of it supremely interesting to me. Surprising, even... to the me of the insomniacks, that is. To the regular me, having to be inside of that moment is horrible.

See what I mean, about the you that gets shifted over, and sees things differently? Mostly tragic things, and interestedly as opposed to horrifyingly? See? See what I mean? I'm looking California, and feeling Minnesota. Get it?

You wanna know what's ironic? Back when I was a normal human... I used to think, as I was about to go to sleep, with my head on my pillow, and all covered up and comfy, I used to think, all the time, I used to think this, as I was falling asleep:

'What if I didn't go to sleep, but instead I just kept thinking over and over... what if I just can't go to sleep?' And then I'd fall asleep. And every night, as I thought of the possibility of - the what if - of not being able to sleep, I'd fall asleep. And then one day the what if came true. It's exactly like an impossible monster made real. The boogey man actually came true. Can you believe that shit? Well, the boogey man may be a metaphor, but he definitely came true for me, and it still seems just as impossible.

And oh man, is it ever just as horrible as I ever imagined.