Arie traced circles on my back as I struggled to close my eyes, to fall into some other state of mind, but it seemed as if that was an impossible feat. For some reason, it was getting harder and harder to fall asleep, but it didn't bother me as much as it does other people since I could function on little to no sleep. It's not a healthy habit, and I knew that all too well. Being an insomniac changes your perspective on things, you spend hours searching through your head for answers that you can't find. It's like trying to find a book in an unorganized library, wandering about and pulling a book off the shelf, only to realize that it's not what you were looking for, and continuing to move on to the next book, and even the one after that. But I lied awake on nights that I couldn't sleep, and sometimes, I'd just watch the clock and count down how many seconds, minutes, hours until I had to get up again. I was fascinated by the concept of time, the cycle of it, and how there was never a way to stop it, even if it was merely for a moment. Sometimes it passed slowly and other times it passed quickly, but the nights when closing my eyes didn't end in falling asleep, it seemed like every second lasted a lifetime.
The late hours of night and early hours of morning are one and the same, they blend together like red and blue paint creates purple. After a while, your eyes begin to ache from staring at the ceiling, the wall, your blankets, from the way you've shifted your gaze for hours in an attempt to entertain yourself somehow. Your vision begins to blur when you stare at one spot too long, it turns it into splotches of light and dark that illuminate the room, that stretch along the walls like a mural, and even though you're aware that your mind is tricking you into seeing it, there's something beautiful about the images. Reality becomes anything but, your head feels fuzzy and your body feels heavy, and yet, sleep still refuses to come the same way a child refuses to take a nap. But for people like me, the ones who lie awake at night, the concept is incomprehensible because there is so much effort that has to be put into falling asleep, even with the pills they say will help, I still couldn't fall into that state of unconsciousness, where you dream of things that you probably won't even remember by the time you wake.
Everything was silent, it seemed like the whole world was asleep while I laid there, unable to close my eyes to the darkness that filled the room, trying to count sheep in my mind but failing miserably. The night seemed to last so long since I couldn't sleep through the hours where the sun went down. It felt like my eyes were bruised, it hurt to keep them open, to blink, and it only felt worse when I closed them. I sighed loudly, frustrated with myself, with the insomnia that never went away no matter how hard I tried, no matter how hard the doctors tried. Arie laid back and pulled me towards him, my head rested against his chest, and even though there wasn't a heart beating against my cheek, the gesture still provided some sort of comfort. There's something secure about having someone's arms wrapped around your body, like a shield blocking out the world around you, protecting you from anything and everything, keeping you safe in a way that you couldn't do on your own. My muscles relaxed a bit upon the realization that there was nothing in the world that could touch me while I was laying like this, while he held me as though I was more important than I was.
One of the biggest things to realize is that you really do have to treat every single action like it could be the last one you ever make. Shit happens, that just how the world works, and there's nothing you can really do to stop or change it. Sure, we all make plans, don't we? But it's almost like we try to plan the future to escape the present, we spend so much of our time looking forward or backward instead of what's happening right now. I had learned how to do that, to take things day by day instead of planning my entire life, because the fact is that anything could happen. And one of the biggest regrets I had was how much I believed in the future that I thought was set in stone. I thought I had everything planned out, but I didn't, everything changed, and I wasn't sure how I felt about it. But I don't think that plans are supposed to be permanent, they're just a general idea of what you want at the time, or more often, what you think you want. It's funny how that works. Everything is just full of twists and turns, and that terrified me. In spite of everything, the beauty of life is that it can transform into anything, especially things that you never expected to happen. Regardless of how it plays out, everything has a way of working itself out in the end.
