Work Text:
Insomnia is just the symptom of something larger. Find out what’s wrong, listen to your body.
I just wanted to sleep.
When you have insomnia it’s like you're renting your own body.
You're evicted and replaced with a reckless teenager. Inconsiderate of your home furnishings, your feelings, your appearance.
Everything is picked and prodded until there’s just the hollow shell of your body left.
This is how it is with insomnia. Everything is so far, a copy of a copy of a copy. The distance of everything, you can’t touch anything and nothing can touch you.
I’m serious.
You get these episodes of lethargy, where your body feels heavy and anchored down, your fingers and toes tingle and you can’t seem to get them warm.
You try to put toothpaste on your toothbrush and miss, try again, and miss again, an endless loop of trial and error.
At work, when my boss expects my reports to be done by the end of the day, my fingers are heavy as I type. Typos and inaccuracies flood the reports and I can't do anything about it.
I couldn’t care less. Would he rather have no report? It’s pathetic when the best you’ve got is a mentally ill insomniac.
The days stretch out and even they feel lethargic. Heavy and thick like the slime growing underneath your kitchen sink.
Chew some valerian root, get more exercise, take some melatonin.
As if I haven’t tried.
After a while, the lethargy goes away, and you forget everything you’ve felt. You only notice when the out of body sensation goes away.
After the lethargic state, the narcolepsy settles in. The sweet release.
This is when your body can’t keep itself awake anymore, and you start involuntarily nodding off.
At work, during meetings, you enter the dark and cold boardroom, your boss and his superior flirting about what shade of blue he’d prefer as an icon. Their voices warp into a continuous, dull ringing in your ears.
And you’re gone.
You wake up, and everyone’s grabbing their briefcases and retreating back to their cells.
No one says anything, no one can say anything.
“Do you know about him?”
“I hear he pays guys to beat the shit out of him.”
“I hear he beats the shit out of himself.”
You wake up at your desk.
The first rule of Fight Club is you don’t talk about Fight Club.
I left the rules of Fight Club in the copy machine again.
The second rule of Fight Club is you don’t talk about Fight Club.
My boss looks at me with disdain, reading the rules off the paper.
“Is this yours?”
What?
“Think about how this looks, what would you do in my position?”
I think whoever wrote that is seriously sick in the head, I say, and you should fire them immediately.
Click, drag, file deleted.
You wake up at the photocopier.
I’m scanning reports for people I don’t care to know, and who don’t bother to care about me.
Ricky nods his head at me as he pushes the cart of pen boxes past the floor, only he knows what I am, what I can become.
You wake up at your desk, again.
My boss’s yellow tie bleeds into purple, today must be Thursday.
Thursdays I go to “Learning to Soar,” my bone cancer group..
Wait.
Marla took my Thursdays.
She can have the aplastic anemia, she’d fit right in, anyway.
The groups don’t help anymore, the catharsis I get from Fight Club built my tolerance, like my smoking habit. Once you start, it’s hard to break the cycle.
Sometimes I miss the liminal architecture, people like Chloe, the old book smell of music rooms.
I miss the cold embrace of strangers, Chloe’s collar bone digging into my shoulder, the too-tight hold of Bob’s arms. I miss the routine of it all.
Now I sit at my desk, count how many colors of ties my boss has, glare at that southern jackass in the boardroom.
Bob goes to Fight Club on Thursdays.
I only sleep when Tyler and I fight, which isn’t very often nowadays. Nowadays he’s out rendezvousing with his Space Monkeys, vandalizing buildings and blowing up Microsoft.
My role at Fight Club is to linger in the dark and spectate when necessary. Most of the time Tyler doesn’t show, and when he does he’s either monologuing to the crowd or mounting Angel Face on the concrete.
Dogs hump others to see how many will accept the behavior; a move that leads to fights with other dogs.
You wake up at the house on Paper Street.
The walls are caked with sweat and grime from all the manual labor, the air smells sour, it makes me woozy.
You wake up at the house on Paper Street and you’re alone.
You wake up at the house on Paper Street and Tyler’s gone.