Sleepless Toil

Written: 7/30/2012

I awake suddenly, startlingly, with an all too familiar sense of dread and the lingering fragments of a bad dream.  It’s 2:38 AM.  As best I can figure, I have slept for 12 minutes – at tops.

My mind racing, my emotions swirling, I labor exhaustingly, trying to force unconsciousness back to the forefront. I resist each new stream of thought, pausing just long enough to register its fiber, lest it be the welcomed illusion of dream state.

The war rages, thought casualties stack themselves in a heap.  Time has slowed – no stretched itself.

UGH!!!  It’s hopeless.

I pause, accepting my demise, and take inventory of the various words, images, feelings, states of mind that I have explored in this interlude:

Lurid, lucid, lustful, imaginative, quixotic, enigmatic, foolish, devilish, aspiring, hungry, aching, sleepless, hurting, humbled, genius, frightened, creative, whirling, tumultuous, lost…

Wow!  What an eclectic conundrum.  No wonder I can’t sleep.

I refocus my visual orbs in the luminescent din of LEDs.  It is 3:04 AM.  I’M SO SCREWED!

Feeling now completely drained, I decide to give up all hope of restful sleep and write about my demise. I drag myself out of bed, trying not to fall over as I saunter out of my bedroom, across the hall and into my office. I flop into my chair, click open a Word document and start typing.

“Wait a minute. It’s only a couple of words – sentence fragments. Disjointed, illogical, comic,” I think to myself…

… Just woke up again feeling dazed, still sitting in my office chair in front of my PC. Don’t think I was out long. I stare at the screen trying to focus and resume writing this – whatever it is.

My Assets: A good hand; a good heart; a fair, creative mind

For much of my young adult life, I fretted relentlessly over the questions of God, existence, and reality – my own and others’.

When I read, my reality transformed from my own to that of the author’s.  My sense of self diminished as I was swept into each new world with its own set rules and spiritual texture.

A Treatise on Self!

…

I am he – and he is me!

My shadow.