Each and every night never seems to end,
blending together in a maelstrom of insomnia, rumination,
and endless loneliness.
1 am, 2 am, 3 am, 4 am, 5 am,
meaningless demarcations in an experience that is truly marked by descent into
the void, the emptiness, the staring at the ceiling wondering when this will all finally be over with.
I stopped praying to G-d long ago for any kind of solace,
now I pray to Him only for an end; or I pray to the pills to take me anywhere but here.
When I walk the streets to escape from the sleeplessness, I only encounter the piercing feeling of loneliness.
Calling numbers that will never pick up, having conversations to fill the emptiness, desperately clawing at anything that will make a dent in all this pain I feel.
How do you tell someone that I am talking because the silence draws me deeper into madness?
Nights turn into weeks, weeks into months, and soon,
living becomes a plod to oblivion to the slow cadence of a death march.
Days don’t seem like days, they are a blur, all time becomes a binary experience:
with people and feeling alive enough to live or being alone enough to feel like you’re not alive.
I close my eyes for the few hours rest I can wrestle from the heavens, and when I awaken,
I feel alone with nothing but the remnants of nightmares and alarm clocks to wish me good morning.
Even a nap is dangerous.
Night terrors rob me of any relief, waking to an altered reality, caught in the dreamscape, panicked, and feeling like I can still hear the screams and violence inches from my face.
Uncontrollable sobbing, gasping for air, feeling life strangling me, why would I ever want to wake up?
Caught between the horrors of what my sleep brings and the reality that never seems to really exist,
why wouldn’t I choose the devil I know over whatever unknown this world brings?
But these nights, these damn nights, they kill me over and over again.
Restless, waiting, disappointed, fearful, and all so alone.
The loneliness is the true torture, the real demon that haunts these sleepless evenings.
In prison, in your cell, at least you have someone to talk to.
In this prison of mine, I have to make up all of the voices.
I hate what they say to me, and I hate myself for talking back to them.
So I call, and I call, and I call the list.
Every name a possibility, someone to give me a break from the yoke of this loneliness.
Ten minutes, thirty minutes, anything I can take to make me feel less utterly alone in this pain.
I hate myself for needing them so much, almost as much as I hate hearing the silence when no one answers.
I have friends around the world, or so I think, but it is hard to reach out, to grab hold of some kind of hope
when multiple time zones keep you away from the vast majority of people that ever cared about you.
Maybe tonight will be different, I have been blessed with a new pill to try.
Will it give me rest? Will it silence the nightmares? Will it finally make the voices stop?
I can only pray to whatever is up there that this night will be different;
but I don’t have much hope.
Too many nights have been fed to the hell that I am living, the fires that devour me every night,
the same fire that fills my veins with flames, my mind with a swirling inferno, and turns my soul to embers.
This has all been one long night without end, days are merely punctuation.
Loneliness while awake, horrors in my sleep, over and over and over.
The fire feeds itself and propels my body even though I try and will it all to just stop.
1 am, 2 am, 3 am, 4 am, 5 am,
meaningless numbers that mark nothing but the time left before I have to suffer vertically.
These nights are killing me slowly, lonely, one sleepless hour at a time.