A drozyness filled the room, a weight that pulled
at your limbs and eyes, compelling them ever closer to the floor, to close
and let darkness wash over you. There was noise in the background
but it was indistinguishable with the soft caressing music that came from
the mind. Crooning you ever closer to the sleep, which you ever strive
to keep from you. The mind searches for something, anything that
can entertain it, a weapon against the sleepiness that pulls at it, but
there’s nothing. Nothing that can break through that impenetrable
wall of sleep, the soft crooning music that hypnotically pulls the mind
closer to the brink.
There’s something else though beyond that sleepiness, something that
you almost don’t recognize until you have reached that dark abyss and look
back. A feeling that you know but still can not name, not because
you don’t know it but because you do not want to admit it. As you
look back from that pit of darkness, from sleep and the unknown dreams
that lay beyond you see an even deeper blackness. Suddenly that desire
to fight sleep is gone and you wish nothing more but to plunge into the
unknown. Just a quick step and you will be there but suddenly you
can’t move. Mesmerized by the sight you see behind you, you face
that which you do not want to.
You spend so much of your time wearing that mask
of emotions, letting people see what you want them to see, not what you
are actually feeling that you almost don’t recognize what you are looking
at, but then it comes to you. A painful reality that you do not wish
to accept that truth that no one really likes to accept, but it holds you
from the sleep, which you now suddenly desperately crave. The more you
deny it the deeper it pulls you into it until you suddenly found yourself
trapped in it so deep that there’s no hope of escape. In a brief
flash you see it all happen see yourself forever mired down in that bog
of disappear.
Still you stare into the blackness of depression and regret and you
wonder, how bad could it actually be? You have already hidden it from everyone,
even your closest friends to one degree or another. It’s a strange
love hate relationship you find you have. You hate how it makes you
feel that pit within the bottom of your stomach, that voice of doubt in
your head that tells you no. Yet you love how you fell so close to
the brink of some dark pit, walking the edge that could mean life or death
that is only razor thin. It makes you feel so alive to be at that point,
not afraid of anything.
You wonder, how close could you actually go, how
far could the limits be pushed until it becomes almost an obsession for
you to calculate it all out. Still through out it all the soft song
of sleep croons to you and although you try to ignore it as you think but
it is not a song that you can ever block out, it may be louder or softer
at times but it is always there. Suddenly your eyes are pulled from their
stare at that dark hole back to the edge of sleep where you still totter.
Below your feet thin clouds swirl in an unending circle. You peer
at it closer and you notice a picture form, a face, one you are all too
familiar with. You smile as you see it, the face of a friend whom
you have spent many good hours with and reach towards it, but behind you
something beckons. You turn slightly and the image fades back into the
clouds.
The song still sings in your head rising slightly
as you turn once again, but you block it out to a dull buzz and begin your
calculating again. You balance the good versus the bad in your mind but
once again the soft song of sleep breaks through your thoughts. The
clouds below your feet are swirling again and a new face is forming, a
face that brings back the memories you have worked hard to forget.
The image of that girl you never could ask out when you were in high school
or perhaps the one from college that dumped you. It’s and indistinct
face ever changing reminding you of all those things and memories you wished
never happened and you turn quickly back to the blackness.
For a third time you contemplate the thoughts of
yielding to it, of letting it take you into it and letting it hold you
forever. Again the song sings to you and pulls you around one last
time to look at those swirling clouds. A new image begins to form
but you can’t make it out. You lean closer to see it, squinting your
eyse slightly. Slowly it takes shape in the form of that one thing
that always makes you smile, that face or memory you often recall to help
you maintain that mask that you always try to show the world, that smile
that never quite fits with the look in your eyes. You reach for it
and suddenly find yourself falling. The song is louder now seeping
through your pours.
The eye blinks with sleepiness and inside, the mind
struggles against itself. It closes again and the body slumps over
asleep.
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