Wide awake

It is manageable, to a point, to occupy your mind with texts, with images, with pixels, with numbers, with lines, with shapes, with shapes of locks, in order to avoid having to deal with the rubbish churning in your head. You can do this until you are exhausted, until you can no longer keep your eyes open, until you think you are safe from your thoughts enough to turn in, but once your head hits the pillow you are wide awake inescapable, trapped in a frame of a film. You find yourself staring at the ceiling unblinking, until your tears start to flow, until you find yourself crying, or until you can’t tell one from the next.

So you lie with your arms crossed over your chest to stop your heart hyperventilating; you lie with your arms crossed over your face to vary the shade of darkness, to stop the sound of your thoughts moving, the sound of your blanket adjusting, the sound of skin on skin, the sound of your frown forming, the sound of your mother’s scent moulding, the sound of your wits departing, the sound of your deep breaths jerking against the pillow, the sound of your hair pricking, the sound of cotton sheets flapping in the breeze, the sound of the Hills Hoist turning right outside your window screeching and spinning in a ghastly wind – all magnified, multiplied, you are terrified of being alone with all this.

It is not multiple voices you hear, because there is only one, which in the daytime you try to drown out with heavy metal, death metal, loud mechanical sounds, anything you get my hands on, but at night you fall through the safety net as it haunts you reciting the same words over and over above the burning in the yearning pits of hell deep in your guts. A saving grace, if any, lies in its singularity – the only thing multiple is the faces. When you close your eyes all you see are faces changing, shifting with your every thought—it is tormented, then it is petrified, then laughing, then weeping, then teasing, then abusing, then mocking; sometimes ugly, sometimes silly, sometimes merciless, sometimes blank, sometimes full of meaning, sometimes malicious, sometimes vomiting over your shoes, sometimes bleeding from the eyes, sometimes sandpapered raw and breathing through the pores.

And behind the faces are words and senses, false ad-lib words real pulsing senses seeping through the gaps in your teeth. You need to put pen to paper until you are rid of them. But you are afraid to get up because once you do you are back doing time, sitting out your sentence until you are exhausted again, until you can rely only on your eyes to make your decision for when to turn, to turn in, turnpiking at a tollgate. You can’t, you can’t afford it, you can’t afford to do it anymore, you need a ground, a grounding force, some measure of stabilising resoluteness, but lately the only way you make a well-reasoned decision is by the fluidity of the numbers on the clock – choose life only if the number goes from 3.18 to 3.19 in the next 10 seconds.