I Wish I was a Somnambulist

At least then I'd be asleep. I can't. Sleep. Not at the moment, but hopefully soon. My room just felt big and I had to come downstairs to the office. My office. To the recliner in the corner which calls to me. This room isn't so vast. But my room? It was. Is. Your room ever feel big? Like when you lay in bed and you're too far away from your ceiling and the walls are too far away from your bed and you can swear that even in the pitch black oblivion of your room, puncuated only by the haunting red glow of your digital clock, that the room is still getting bigger.

Or maybe you're getting smaller. And the silence around you is deafening. Your roommate's TV, which normally runs just loud enough for you to hear it through the wall, an ever present white noise, is silent tonight -- that or he's watching some dirty video and has it turned down low enough so as not to be discovered and so that comments like this one are guaranteed to be purely speculative. And even still, you know there are three other human beings somewhere in the house, all sleeping, hopefully peacefully, and yet the only sound that permeates the night is the inconsistent flutter of what you can only suppose is a wayward moth trapped between your window blinds and the double-paned glass that guarantees the moth is staying put, no matter how much it fights to get outside, into the night air, to one of the many porch lights that tease it through the panes like the Sirens that tempted Odysseus.

My sentences grow longwinded in my encapsulating fatigue.

And then you think of that moth and its futile attempts to break away from the darkness and you wonder how you can apply its plight to your everyday life -- because at three in the morning, you're suddenly very introspective and the thought of comparing your existence to that of a moth makes more sense than you'd care to admit. So you start comparing yourself to the moth whose fluttering is now grating against your eardrums. And while you realize that existence for you is not as dire as being trapped between blinds and window panes in the suffocating darkness, your life isn't at the place you want it to be. You're not at the job you want (or any job really for some of us). And you don't really even know where you should be heading -- but you know it's towards the light... any light... and yet you too feel the frustrating limitations of a double paned glass window standing seven stories tall right in front of you.

Or maybe tonight's wakefulness comes at you rather than from within -- you can't sleep because of reasons that have nothing to do with you and your life... but of someone else's. For once, perhaps, in your solipsistic little world, your brain is running overtime worrying about your best mate because sometimes best mates need worrying about.

Or maybe you can't sleep because the person you love most in the entire world is a few miles away, in her own big empty bed and you're not with her and you can't drive the fifteen minutes to her place even though she wouldn't be the slightest bit upset to be woken by your knocking because it would mean her bed wouldn't be so empty tonight -- no, you can't drive over there because your car is out of commission because you've been too lazy to get the brakes fixed and now you're stuck...

Laying in a big empty bed. In the dark. Listening to a sad little moth fight a futile war with your window panes. Wishing you were a somnambulist. And missing your beautiful lucidity. At least when I do finally slumber this eve, I know what I'll be dreaming about. All dreams should be so sweet.