Is it back?
How do you survive something when you know it might just break you...
It’s back.
Well, at least, it seems that way because for the last few nights, I have felt it crouching in the corner of my room. It feels a bit like I am being watched, tested—perhaps. Like if I can’t quite drift off to sleep within a suitable timeframe, it will sneak out from under its cover and smother me slowly.
The darkness, it calls to me. It calls me names and pokes at my vulnerabilities. It shape-shifts and ekes its way into the crevices of my mind. It reverberates around the edges of my sanity, touching all the shadows that don’t get cast in light during the day. It claws at my back, tears skin from bone, removing all remnants of sanity and safety.
While I’ve spent years honing my skills against this very threat, I am unable to stop its destruction once it creeps in. By then, it’s too late. I’m at its mercy and let me tell you, it is in no way merciful.
At first, I try to outsmart it. If only I don’t show my fear—then perhaps, it will go away. It will sink back into the corners of the room, cover itself with a heavy woollen blanket and let me be. Hours can go by this way. I, tossing and turning, reading and weeping silently, tuning into the voices of others as they try to lull me into slumber.
But it knows. It always knows.
My body knows it, too. It feels different. It’s not an anxiety that explodes because it’s been unrecognised or ignored during the day. You know the type, when you’ve got something on your mind and yet your subconscious decides to wait until the pitch black of night before reminding you to fret about it? It’s not that. That would almost be a comfort as I would have some sort of messy roadmap to untangle.
This.. This, feels insurmountable.
It knows my smarts will soon start to fade and the fear will begin to take over. My breath will quicken, my pulse will race, my skin will feel wick with sweat. But it will be my tears that betray me.
Once they start to fall, they will run. They will carve rivers down my cheeks, and not until the dam is dry will they stop. The salty trails they leave in their wake will begin to tighten my skin. My eyes will heave and moan. And my body will give up.
But my mind won’t. My mind will never just shut the fuck up. It will try to rationalise its way out of the fear until the sun rises. So the irony is, while the insomnia smothers me, in some ways, I wish its abilities extended to the physical. I wish it could hold me down and force me into submission. But it doesn’t seem to be able to smother my mind. It just paralyses my body and makes the agony of being awake feel all the worse.
Sometimes, if I’m lucky, the physical exhaustion of being in fear will eventually tip me into a heavy, dreamless sleep. If I’m lucky, an hour or two of this forced ‘reboot’, will trick me into thinking I can cope. But it knows I can’t. It knows that as soon as dusk settles once again, I’ll let it back in. The dark will call to me once again and despite the terror it inflicts—my strategies won’t have adapted. If anything, my senses will be just that little bit duller.
The only hope is that one day, I won’t fail. That one day I’ll manage to fool it—it won’t be able to smell my fear and instead of watching me from the corner of the room, it too will fall asleep and fall away.