Tonight is one of “those” nights, the kind I wonder if anyone else has but me. Roller coaster, merry-go-round, can’t rest, can’t sleep nights. Where the sheets scrape against my skin like sandpaper and my thoughts twirl and spin with a maddening velocity. I try grabbing hold of the tiniest, little fragment of a thought that disappears as soon as my mind’s fingertips come near only to find something else in its place. A new thought, a new idea reels almost within my grasp only again to be chased out by yet another, and another, and another. There’s no end to it! Try to stop, try to blank out the images that dance their way like a crazy play behind my closed eyelids, but they just keep slipping through the crack relentlessly. I’m dizzy, my stomach feels queasy, the weirdest pictures are flashing; I’m overwhelmed by my own helplessness.
Voices of people I have known and loved crowd each other out for equal time inside my skull. I can’t quite tell if they’re talking to me, each other, or to themselves; in their persistence they are deafening. There seems to be no room left for me, not one wee bit of grey matter that is not already occupied. The effort to find some refuge, a resting place is so taxing that thin rivulets of perspiration begin to trace their way from my breasts down to my belly. I am becoming frantic. The digital clock ticks away the minutes, the seconds of my life unmercifully. Blinking, twinkling, reminding me that all there is time.
Every miniscule, little sin, every mis-spoken word, or knowing act of cruelty spin like demented tops. I don’t want to remember! Lying here in the dark I can feel my face flush anew in embarrassment and chagrin. If only I could make it better somehow, change the actions of the past, make amends to those who I so wantonly wounded in such a cavalier manner. Click, click, click, a captive.
It’s nights like these that I swear that I’m insane. When all control of oneself is gone, when I twist and groan beneath the covers in a desperate attempt to escape from what my mind demands I see again. Even my fear becomes confused, am I insane? Will part of my life be spent locked away from the world like my Mama, watching myself draw farther and farther away beyond the reach of others?
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