You lie in the darkness of your bedroom, street lights dimly illuminating the small room from the outside, the whiteness of the snow adding to it, making the room rather bright for the middle of the night. A moment passes – you can’t sleep. Another moment passes. You close your eyes to at least try to fall asleep with only a few hours left to sleep if you succeed but you hear a foreign sound. It catches you off balance. The sound that has no room in your apartment. The sound of a dog pacing around in your flat. You hear claws against the floor, the subtle gentle scratch of the wood. The dog paces, going from the corridor, to the kitchen, to the living room, standing near your closed bedroom. It goes through the same pattern again. Then, silence. You exhale the breath you didn’t know you were holding in. The interesting part of it all is that you don’t have a dog.
Another night, right the next day, you once again lie in bed and hear another odd sound. A voice? Voices? Multiple voices of…men? You listen closely and hear men screaming in unison outside, about a dozen of them. Their low voices meld, drowning out any other possible noise. The screams get louder, like a choir, the feeling of as if they are screaming right outside of your window. You slowly crawl out of your cold bed and look outside the window only to see nothing. Nothing at all. Not a soul can be seen outside. Not surprising, considering you live on the 8th floor of an apartment building. Once you glance out the window, the shouting of men stops. Figures.
A few days later you wake up suddenly, violently and in a cold sweat. You’re not sure whether it’s a bad dream, a panic attack, or something else entirely. You want to grab a glass of cold water to stop shaking from whatever woke you up. You throw a look outside the window and see lights in the graveyard not too far away. Your legs seem to be rooted to the ground, you cannot move. The pale lights appear to not be accompanied by anyone, or at least you cannot see anyone wielding them or controlling them, walking besides them. The lights dance as they slowly move through the graveyard, your breath hitches as you don’t understand what is going on but you can’t seem to walk away. You stare because you don’t know what will happen. Once the lights reach the edge, the wall that separates the graveyard from the sidewalk and the road, the flicker of lights suddenly disappear. There is no one there, no one emerges with a flashlight or a phone, no one walks out of the gate of the graveyard. You stare for 5 more minutes but nothing more happens, the lights have vanished into the nothingness of night’s darkness. In the morning, when you wake up broken once again, you don’t understand whether it was a dream or reality. Or maybe something in between.
You couldn’t sleep last night. Your eyes refused to shut and your brain refused to stop thinking and whirring, you swear you can sometimes hear the gears grinding in there. It’s the wrong kind of thoughts that keep beating up your mind until you give in. Falling asleep before getting to this point is always your go to but your insomnia and fucked up sleeping schedule don’t care. You drown into intense thoughts that take you away in a moment. You get lost inside your own head.
Everyone is a snake. Everyone is a deceiver, a betrayer. Everyone is playing the game. Everyone is trying to throw someone else under the bus to emerge victorious. Everyone is doing something they don’t need to get what they want. And here you are, ready to burn empires and scatter the ashes while maintaining a distance and not partaking your part in any of it. Everyone has a role to play but you defy it. As always. The deceiver, the devourer, the defier, the pariah. You feel alone in your endeavors, closed off, a thick tall wall between you and everyone else. Different in your thoughts and experiences, different in your needs and wants. Different in the things that make you feel at least a crumble of being alive. Alone.
All alone. Save my soul.
“Is there something deeply evil living within me or am I just past my bedtime.”
