There's nothing 'just' about insomnia

So this is what it feels like. This numbness of insomnia. My eyes feel dried up and parched. They burn. I don't blink, thinking that maybe sleep will come into my empty, open eyes and get lodged in there like a little pebble. My head feels a little heavy but there's no nausea. I thought there would be. But my stomach feels settled and strong and I do get hungry.

But it's the thinking that has been the casualty. It's fraying like lime in water. I need to read a page several times before I understand what it means. These are pages I myself have written. These are pages I have skimmed over several times in a span of 15 minutes and understood. Words - these are words. I could understand words and sentences and language. They were
the bylanes I could travel at night with only my blinking mobile for light. Now, trying to understand something is like trying to hit a moving target. It is difficult.

I also feel slow. A drugged panther. Virile without vigor.

And then there is the restlessness that tenses up behind my neck, that courses through my veins, that gets all knotted up at the base of my throat, that makes me clench and unclench my jaws. There is that - that unholy, loud, silent shout.

I keep thinking aimlessly of so many things. It's a lot of fun and it's exhilarating, but it also keeps me awake. There's no thought that passes noiselessly. It bops around here and there like a marble that's flung aside. Like, I read this somewhere: in wedding photography, a bride's white dress is one of the most difficult things to photograph well. Now, I read Endymion
but I keep thinking of some photographer at a wedding fiddling around with a camera trying to get a perfect picture.

Memory dissipates. I forget what channel I want tuned when the cable-guy comes to collect money. I forget to tell the rickshaw fellow where to stop. I remember my fifth birthday when I first saw a cork bob about in a bathtub, when I should be looking left and right while crossing the road. I cause great inconvenience and am calmly unapologetic about it.

In my community we believe that when a person dies with an unfulfilled wish, the soul doesn't get redemption unless that wish is fulfilled. I feel like that now. I don't even know what that wish is. But something is broken and something is dead. And whatever it is, it didn't get a decent burial. My tense, sleepless self wanders about in search of that; in an empty, barren
graveyard with a satin rose that should be put on my consciousness' tombstone.

So there it is - that peace and wisdom and calm and quietude that I thought was my soul, my self, my nostalgia, my religion, my faith - it was simply my sleep.