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Jacket, like his namesake, had always felt like something or somebody that could be shrugged off and hung up. Something with no real defining features, that would be hastily grabbed before darting out the door. Something without a personality, a dead thing.
Yet Jacket was very much alive with a head full of shadows and fuzzy memories, dead eyes staring through the souls of others in search of answers for unspoken questions he didn’t know.
The dark circles under his eyes were starting to solidify the fact that sleep didn’t come easy, if it came at all. Nights were restlessly spent on a beat-up couch, soft neon lights humming and flickering at him, taunting him. He could turn them off but not his brain. It bore into him, flooding his brain with defiant anger but even that was eventually nulled and left a burnt-out field where nothing could grow. His heart a barren wasteland.
Sometimes he was unsure if he dreamt. It felt like memories melting through his brain, faces erased and deformed, beaten in and bloodied. Echoes of people that once were but didn’t exist anymore. He used to care for them, he assumed. A bearded man and a blonde woman, but he couldn’t recall their faces. Had they even had any to begin with or were they simply companions he had conjured for lonely company?
His mouth tasted of static, dry and prickling. Turning onto his side, Jacket looked at the wall. Paint was peeling off, like pieces of skin revealing the flesh underneath. It made his hands twitch involuntarily in pent-up anticipation. His knuckles were sore and bruised, fingernails broken.
He sometimes wondered if he was still alive, but he always concluded that if he could wonder about it, he probably still was. There were no emotions accompanied with those thoughts, as they were nothing more than hard facts. Death was a release beyond his grasp.
He dreamt of dying, once. He had seized to be, blown into a million pieces with no worries or fear. It had all been over, and the dream had been blissful, had left him floating in nothingness. Waking up had been a cold reminder of his permanent presence in reality. It filled his body with numb static and mild disappointment.
A high-pitched sound filled the room. Jacket blinked slowly, seemingly unbothered for a while before he slowly sat up. His body was aching. The worn bandages around his hands dragged across his face, as he tried to bring himself to a respectable state of awareness. Turning his head, he looked at the cassette recorder. He picked up it and turned it over, pressing play.
“… didyouknowthatbetween 10% and 30% of adults have insomnia at any giv—“, the cassette chimed at him before he pressed pause.The high-pitch sound continued as he clicked play again.
“… symptomsofinsomniacanbe caused by or be associated with: Use of psychoactive drugs, use of or withdrawals from alcohol and oth—” it continued before it was cut off again.
Jacket stared dumbly at the cassette recorder in his hands.
“… tmentof insomnia may require a combination ofcognitivebehavioraltherapymedications, and lifestyle changes…”
He wondered if he could stuff the cassette recorder into his mouth and swallow it. He turned it over in his hands again, before putting it down on the couch next to him. Grabbing a crumbled back of cigarettes, he lit one and took a deep drag.
If this was being alive, it didn’t feel worth it.