6:44 am

I can't sleep. I mean I can, up until the point of closing my eyes, then my mind reminds me of all the reasons I can't sleep. Truth be told I'd rather sleep than be awake with it all. When I'm awake I find ways to take my mind off those things, but I'd really rather stay there- asleep. There I don't remember that I'm walking in a memory, I just am. It's when I awake and feel the weight of the air in my lungs that I remember, this is the real one. I don't always wake up expecting something that's not there, but when I do it feels like something has died inside me, leaving me ill at the thought. I usually sleep the feeling away for just a few more hours. Have you ever had a dream that was so entrancing that you felt utter disappointment when you awoke to find it wasn't real, and so you force yourself back to sleep to try and re-imagine it again, hoping to have that experience for just a little longer? It almost never works. But I wake up every morning, for weeks now, from my dreams and feel that utter disappointment. I fall back to sleep not to re-imagine those things, but really rather to escape the thought of them for just a while longer; to let my body settle itself without my having to be a part of the discomfort. But instead of being whisked away by some lighthearted fantasy, or a random over-dramatic, slightly bizarre parallel universe, I get knocked back into that reality my mind would prefer. I would too, were it not for the fact that I must eventually wake from it. It's like waking up one morning with a gut wrenching feeling inside that tells you the day you just lived before never happened, and it reminds you of what seems to be days ago and says that was yesterday. And that day seems very much like this day. Whatever it was in between was not really your life at all, but merely the product of an over active imagination that has been suppressed thoroughly throughout the day into the places of the subconscious reserved for child-like beliefs and memories that are never to be recalled intentionally again. It's that same place we keep all those things we thought we've forgotten about until the memories are recalled for a moment by small details or phantom scents in the air. Some times it's just a shade of color that sparks those details of my memory that I would rather not recall for the time being. I can't think of a color that doesn't take me back to that other place, the life that's not mine. It's a strange thing to pass by a shop with money in your pocket, and think, "there's something I was going to purchase." But when you remember what it was, the reasons for buying it no longer apply. That paper in your pocket gets heavy after that. It's funny how an awareness of the thing you've been carrying all along tends to change the gift into burden. I sleep better in the day. I sleep deeper. It makes it harder wake up.