no rest

Last night, I anticipated my ability to be up for hours long after the reasonable. Sometime after midnight I found an Ambien and gave in, swallowing it down. Twenty minutes in and my wallpaper was shifting places and conversational remarks were being flung amongst my body (I had yet to open my mouth). Approaching one am and Ambien had not put me to sleep, but had invited a whole party inside my head. Needing to make the most out of the experience, I grabbed sheets of paper and ferociously wrote notes, documenting my changing world—the vision of my night. The letters were life size and took shape in an arch, rather than a straight line. Looking back, what is coherent enough to comprehend reads as follows: this scene dashes, her words give her face shape and levels of color, the background is bordered, slightly coming and opening the door, this was a concrete unchangeable image but now it is me, whimsically, there seems to be different colors of her, she is a goddess, hair polished by pearls with earrings that hang in ornamentation, walk in, walk out, upon looking at this which captivated her once, a photographer stole her image, putting it in his photograph and claiming the subject of the image was achieved by himself “The Photographer,” look at the models on a page, they are stuck in their shot, crying for us to see that they want to move on. Take the meaning of that as you will. Standing up, my sight patchy, I stumbled into the kitchen and attempting to satisfy a hunger that wasn’t even there made oatmeal and raspberries (it was atrocious and sat discarded by the sink). Minutes later, completely blind by Ambien’s fighting urge to place me in a world of darkness, I unburied my phone and began taping away messages. Automatic spell check, trying desperately to stop me, revealed that all words were spelt wrong…put the phone down! I resisted, and in some linear manner typed up my messages into a Word document and then accurately text messaged them. They were immediately a terrible embarrassment and am awakened by the reality that no one will catch their imbedded humor or laugh with me at how within my own drowsiness I still have the persistency to candidly communicate. I resigned to my satin bed and playlist of music, woke seven times through the night for grapefruit juice, hummus and a slim fast bar (I don’t think I wanted any of this, but rather just wanted to make room in the refrigerator and cabinets by morning), fell back asleep and was awoken for the eighth time by a man’s voice (which turned out to be Hotel Chevalier playing on my iTunes), turned to my side and upon looking out the window watched it snow (most dreamers slept through this and woke with no sign of it having occurred). To sum up the relevance of the story: no matter how many drug-induced agents I take, I don’t sleep. I have a fighting urge to remain actively aware.

I believe this sleeplessness comes only because I write. For no matter how little and how badly I write, I am still made sensitive by these minor shocks, feel, especially towards evening and even more in the morning, the approaching, the imminent possibility of great moments which would tear me open, which would make me capable of anything, and in the general uproar that is within me and which I have no time to command, find no rest. -Kafka.