You don’t sleep normally for about 2 months and in recent weeks you’ve pretty much stopped sleeping altogether. “Sleeping is for people who have too much time,” you’ve used to joke. Now it feels like you have too much time and not enough time simultaneously. Your face is not even pale but a certain shade of grey now. The circles under your eyes are a blooming color of the void mixed with a little bit of blue. You don’t recognize yourself in the mirror anymore, you try not to linger at it either. You’re not sure when you’ve started slipping again. You’re not even sure what happened and why but everything around is as if under some a stormy dark cloud. You don’t talk about it.
“How are you doing?” someone asks you from time to time.
“I’m alright, just a bit tired,” your go-to answer to anything and everything. Which is true, you’re tired of explaining what’s wrong with you, tired of thinking about it, of dragging everyone around to the bottom, only later to be accused of being a pessimist and a downer. You’ve once thought about this in a similar context, just got some life lessons along the way that it is truly so – no one needs excess baggage and drowning is the problem of the who’s drowning.
The New Year was strangely something to wait for at least, a feel of how something ends and something new begins, mostly because everything else is so dull. But nothing changes. You have nothing to wait for. You drink your zero sugar bullshit energy drink to die just but a little faster. You try your best to die and survive at the same time, yet it’s getting harder everyday somehow.
What little time you spend sleeping, you have the most vivid nightmares and dreams that make no sense. You already wake up tired. The migraines are getting worse. Food has no taste. There is definitely something wrong with your health or so you think, you’ve always been in between extremes, either a sort of a hypochondriac or not caring enough. Whatever it is, you just secretly hope that it makes you die faster.
One day, mid-dream something happened. You dreamt of huge cuts on your arms, you felt the sticky red substance flowing down your arm. You even heard the hit of scarlet drops on your bathroom tiles with painful accuracy.
“This is not real,” you said.
“Nothing is real,” she answered.
You woke up with your arms weirdly itching that morning.
************************************************************************
Another dream, you see yourself somewhere, white noise, white space.
“Is there anything you fear?” you hear yourself asking. The dream you has such an intense stare, you feel as if your eyes are being drilled through and they burn with cold fire.
“No, everything I fear has already happened,” you say out loud dryly.
The dream you chuckles, laughs at your missteps, then asks, “Do you ever win?”
“At what?” you don’t understand the question and the sudden shift in the air.
“At anything” the other you laughs and the dream fades.
And you fell apart. You’re not sure if you can bring yourself back up again. You always have that quote at the back of your head “Some people die at 25 and aren’t buried until they’re 70.” It pains to see yourself reduced to this. You don’t even know where you begin and the illness ends. Is there even anything left of you. You don’t remember yourself, don’t remember what or who you used to be. You really think you died all those years before and now it’s just a suppressed version of yourself, shifted and perverted by the illness, by life. There are no solutions and you feel as if backed into a corner with nowhere to go. You miss no-one, you want nothing, you feel either nothing or everything at the same time.
You marinate in the same four walls that you feel trapped in and grateful for. You’re glad that no one can see your face.
“If I can change I hope I’ll never know.“