This time, last year...

or was it two years ago?

i wish sleep was the only thing i had to fight.
i wish the shards of broken dishes weren't here to witness how far i've fallen along a cursed downwards spiral-a descent into my own hell- and this day of all days- on my own birthday, i wish i was back in my old room, fighting sleep and watching snowflakes falling quietly, wishing me a happy birthday...


[2 am
And again I am desperately fighting the desire to sleep. Ahhh sleep— so tempting, so inviting, it appears as a perfect vision of rest and peace, opening its arms to take me to that land of bright colors and light and it’s hard to resist, yet there’s always that voice, that same voice louder than ever before, drumming in my temples with its “You must not sleep, you must Not sleep. Must not, must not sleep.”

I am tired. I am so tired. An overwhelming, over consuming exhaustion that makes my body sag in its own heaviness, and my eyes seem to be made of lead, and even closed they hurt, they burn and my brain presses hard against the back of my skull that’s like an iron cage where voices ring. Those voices, too many of them all speaking at once… and I can’t, I can’t listen to them anymore… and from their chaotic hum emerges the one, that one that gets louder in the stillness of the night, telling me to open my eyes, wider and wider… you must not sleep, you must not…

*
Dropping into sleep to come back again. I wonder what this night holds for me. I sit here, waiting for that sign, a falling star in a dark sky…

**
Awake, restless with fever, writing in fury trying to recapture a moment, a vision, an evasive thought… trying to write it out, find its outline, draw it on paper. But the pen scratches the smooth surface of the page,  leaving a dull echo…

I find it difficult to separate the beginning from an end. I find it difficult to give shape and order to this jumbled mess that’s been swirling in my mind for oh so long…

I suffer from reminiscences that leave me with regret and I want to cry out over all that’s gone, and I feel old and today I turn twenty two— and for the first time I am afraid, and that’s the fear of aging, the fear of time slipping away, a feeling of losing the stable ground, of losing the firm grip of moments that don’t belong to me anymore and it becomes unbearable to hear the clock ticking seconds away, further into the dread…

Disruption.
A life that seems disrupted, somewhere along the way it has given a crack, an unnatural, brutal interruption that excludes continuity of any kind and the cleft swallows up the future while the past is lost in a haze… I remember how I used to think that if I kept writing I would let the events continue, smoothly flow from one to another… Now I wish I could draw - I would draw a life, my own life, in little sketches and find a place for every detail that has been left out…

I lack completion. I seem to have lost my sense of cohesion, the integrity and wholeness of the self that could be me...

Now I am too tired. I have grown tired of living, a dangerous state of being neither here and there that leaves me feeling utterly uprooted and displaced… And I am aware of the danger of growing too used to this numbness, that is pleasant and soothing… almost like sleep, perhaps even better.

Almost like sleep…

Sleep….
I seem to have dozed off. With a start I wake. How long has it been? A minute or ten? An hour?

It’s dark and cold behind my window, the light in my room leaves long shadows on white …In the dark you can see white on white against the black starless sky…

It’s snowing.
Millions of little diamonds fall from above and if I listen close enough, I can hear the sound of those finest splinters of crystal touching the ice… Beautiful. It’s a beautiful night…

Happy birthday.]

December 18, 2002