Insomnia
“Sleep, that is eight hours a day I can utilize somewhere else”, that is how it starts I suppose. So you condition yourself to save up on hours a day by not sleeping. Mind is greater than body remember, all it really takes is a perception which makes you believe that I am not tired and I am in fact extra productive now. So your need to sleep goes down a considerable notch and you float in the bliss of having more time at your disposal.
However, there are psychological and physical misfires. It would be naïve to claim that you don’t physically tire at all. It just that your brain does not register the messages coming in from the nerves. It becomes a condition like leprosy, obviously not much as worse but a fair analogy, where even though there is physical atrophy, the loss fails at being communicated to the sensory. Gradually it starts to take toll on your mental capabilities. It all happens under the cover of an exponential increase of productivity, a heightened sense of ambiance and an amplified version of creativity. However, underneath it all you are exhausting your brains. It keeps pumping blood, it keeps churning material, it keeps delivering and in its over clocked state it forgets to remember that it is burning out.
This is where the final nail comes in. Suddenly you wake up from your euphoria of achievement and realize that there is a complete loss of sleep. There is a lingering feeling of fatigue underneath your thought process, there is a general numbness of consciousness and a mild muteness of senses. The body aches and the head throbs but you feel them as gentle vibrations under your feet. There is a sledge hammer beating at the walls of your head but the room is sound proof so what you hear is a tiny thud in place of a massive crash. This is where another deprivation of senses takes place, one against which the now aware mind attempts to revolt. At one end there is the conditioned perception of no need for rest and on the other is the consciousness of the need for sleep. It is the will built with time against the intellect of realization. Which one do I listen to or more aptly put what would the mind obey; the will or the logic? This is my battle against insomnia.
The Wall
There were colors on this wall once, bright vibrant colors. A splash of red, a stroke of yellow, a hue of blue and a border of orange. There were faces, there was sparkle, there was life and there was an audience. The abstract blended in flawlessly, the splashes ran between the cracks, the strokes brushed against the rough. The wall was a time warp, you could come and it could soak all your colors and make you eternal. Before color it was white, it was pure and waited with open arms for life. It was without a personality, it was just a presence of divine. Then it sipped in color, it drank life. Then it became a painting, it built a character. However, as is with all that is perfect the wall, the colors, the life was corrupted. Tar seeped through the bricks, paint swelled and cracked and pus squirting out like a disease. The paint faded away and what remained adapted black. The surface eroded and took with it the last breath of pure. The audience were gone and the eternally vibrant were subdued. The wall succumbed to what it was, the chemicals which made it bright revolted and turned dark. There are still traces of what once was behind the tar but it seems like an abomination, a hate crime against all that is not wrong. The colors are gone and with that history of whatever it was.
I am…
I am a myth, I am a fantasy. I am who does not exist, at least not in the way you fancy it to be. I am what you think me to be and therefore I am flawless. I am an ideal a utopia, a whisper of your wishes. I am a cloud of vapors you hope could cover the sun. I am the answer to your questions, the object of your affection. I am a could have been you cannot get over, a mirage you fail to reach. I am what you desire but I am not what you need. I am who you lust and without me you can not sleep. I am who you will wait for even when everything falls apart. I am who can corrupt you and you won’t regret it even after I am gone. I am for whom you will leave everyone else from your past. I am who will sabotage whatever comes in your path. I am the existence of your hopes, the place of your refuge. I am the ultimate gratification you could hope to receive. I am your perfect creation and you bow to my feet.
There Can be Only One
There is something about the entire environment of a hospital ward which is extremely depressing. Its not about having some loved one admitted in one of the rooms, it’s the general aura of the place. Long, marble floored halls, with doors running on both side. The entire place is in utter silence at least twenty hours a day minus the occasional click of the nurses’ heel. Sometimes a patient would leave one of the many doors in the corridor open, which would result in the eerie echo of random coughs, sneezes, the rare moaning of someone in pain and sometimes when it’s extremely silent the wheezing of a old lung. Every night there would be a scream of anguish, denial and pain when someone or the other passes away. Again, the emptiness of the halls will echo the sobs like a lost child at a park after dark.
There would almost always be an old janitor who will be polishing the already sparkling marble at the oddest of the hours. Bottle after bottle of cheap floor cleaning detergent resulting in a stench which wouldn’t leave your clothes till you send them to the laundry. One of the broken wheels of his trolley would squeak and screech from the bizarre of the corners way past the bedtime of any self respecting individual.
The clocks; they seem to be a concept of the outside world in the premises, save for the indicator of the change of shift or the distribution of medicine. Day, night, storm or calm a ward will always be lit by the brightest of lights. No matter what is happening in the world beyond the doors, once you close them behind you, you are in a time warp.
It is in exactly one of these wards where I have been wasting away for the last ten years. I don’t remember the warmth of the sun, the smell of rain, the feel of the summer breeze or the chill of the winter wind. There was a time when the scent of the flowers visitors brought me meant something to me but now it has all been buried under the stink of the chemicals doing rounds in this place. Now my once tanned skin is a sheet of white and my once sharp eyes are always waiting to drown in sleep. My memories, they are fading away and the ones which remain I’ll rather do without them. Faces and faces of people, reels and reels of events, all flip through my eyes, and all the smiles and all the laughter I recall turns into a stab.
The occasional guests who did come said that life has changed outside. People don’t have time anymore and everyone is always running late. They are always in a rush to get from a place they were to a place where they had to be. The had-to-bes never seem to end and no one ever leaves on time. For a few years I pretended to understand the lack of visitors, I fancied that in all the had-to-bes the new world has provided everyone with, my turn just doesn’t come that often. I realized later that the flowers they keep weathering and the faces they keep disappearing.
Me, I only noticed my accumulated attrition the day I decided to pick up my pen again. When anything which ever made you happy and every thought you always wished to remember starts piercing through you, the eventual refuge you find is in a corner of the same pirated mind. You think that maybe if you can save a part of your imagination it may develop and cure the plague which has turned your memories into zombies. This could have been a failure too because my hands were unable to write, but when they planned to take it all away from me they misjudged my intellectual strength.
The creation is in the head, the imagination is an offshoot of the gray matter. Drugs enter our body to depress our senses but what the rest of them don’t realize is that once the five senses are subdued the sixth sense is at its strongest. The jobs being thrown at the over worked processor of the brain are taken off and we become capable of whole new ideals. The plane of normalcy and the extent of creationism is taken to a whole new dimension. We become aware of an entirely different set of thoughts and ideas, of entirely different substance and the non-physical. The human eye can only glimpse seven colors in the spectrum of light but there is an entirely different world which exists all around us; just beyond the boundary of the spectrum we are allowed to see. But where the eyes have their limitations, the power of imagination knows no bounds. It can weave an alternate reality for us, something which only individuals with a profound understanding of self realization can achieve.
It was when I let my conscious self drift in the narrow corridor between floating and drowning in dream that someone finally came for me, someone who never leaves. It’s you who came through all the corruption of the souls who can never realize the abstract. They can never steal you like they took everything else away from me, because to them you do not exist. As long as I have the realization of your existence to talk to, to wake up to, to tell all my stories to, I don’t need my memories, I don’t need pens, I don’t need those phony visitors or their flowers without scent. I have transcended from the material to the immaterial and by god the latter has more matter than actual physics has to offer.
I still remain in the same cliché of a hospital ward but I waste no more. Normal people of the normal world only see the normal version of me being presented to them but behind those glazed eyes, which seldom close, is the reality which would shatter reality, for there can be only one.
