She Cannot Sleep: Between Fiction and Friction


It’s nearly 2am and she cannot sleep because of a dull throbbing in her head.

She can’t let her thoughts rest because they refuse to stop racing. She knows she could take her medication and go through her days sedated like she used to. She would rather be dead than numb. This dull throbbing pulses through her head and body as these thoughts pulse through her worn out psyche.

The eyes are dry, even when they’re shut.

Even when her eyes are shut, she cannot shut out the dryness of the air around herself. The eyes are not soothed with cool moisture. In this same way she cannot shut her eyes to the pain and chaos of daily life.

Night and sleep bring no release from this debilitating depression. There is no relief from the steady dry itching that is every task of each day. This dry itching that is the asinine details of her daily life worsens as it goes and her eyes become more irritated.

She cannot appreciate beauty that passes in front of her eyes if they are dry and irritated. The good things in life that could have been and could be pass in front of her and she does not see them. Instead all she knows is the dry irritation of her eyes and soul. The grains of sand and infectious dirt that rub against the mind, distort and fog over all good and beauty that could have been.

The only beauty she sees is through a haze of smoke that chokes her if she tries to pass through it.

She suffocates in this smoke of her own perception of reality and fails to see things until it is too late to grasp them.

The only beauty she sees is what cannot be for her and what could have been but has since past. “This too shall pass,” seems to apply only to the fleeting instances of beauty and happiness that she tries to grasp at as they slip through her fingers.

Beauty, love and happiness are like water.

But she has no glass.

She has only hands and this water runs through the fingers and leaves her hands wet only for a second. She brings her hands up to refresh her face, but on the way there, they become dry, cracked, and covered with the infectious dirt of her own self-perception and denial.

Her soul is cracked and decaying.

She hangs onto the wish that she were empty. At least then she would be able to be cold to the world around her. Instead, she is half full, but this half is only full of despairing, dying hopes and the irritating sand of self-perception that continues to rub away the last diseased scabs of what could have been her self-esteem.

These scabs fall away and the irritation of the disease of self-perception rubs directly against the core of her being. This irritating rubbing of the little grains of day to day existence detaches her mind completely from logic. There is no time for logic as this itching, irritating, dryness consumes her thoughts. These thoughts overflow into actions and she is left unable to reason.

As the illumination of logic and reason leave her, she is left in the darkness of a madness of irritating details that consumes the conscious and subconscious, leaving her with no way to rest, no way to cope, no way to live.

She cannot live like this, and she finds herself slipping into the fear that she will not be able to survive like this either.

She is not moving forward in life. She is not moving sideways, backwards, or down.

She is being sucked at by the vacuum of deliberating anxiety and depression. This vacuum is breaking her into a million little pieces and destroying her ability to be. As the pieces of what was once her being fall away, anxious, guilt-ridden, depression increases exponentially. These are her remains.

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