The specter of the sleepless night
All day it has been there, not even a memory yet but the threat of one, lying just beyond the rim of thought where I could feel it breathing, waiting, patient as something buried but not dead, wanting only the least surrender of vigilance, the smallest loosening of the mind’s clenched hand, to rise up whole and terrible and make of itself not merely recollection but nightmare, or worse, the waking dream from which there is no waking.
And tonight, because sleep will not come, because the dark holds me open-eyed and suspended above that country into which the defenseless go, insomnia, that old enemy, stands between me and the dream; it keeps me from descending where the memory might find me helpless, might put on its old face and speak in its old voice.
So tonight I will not curse it. Tonight insomnia is not the foe at the gate but the sentinel there, sleepless with me, keeping watch.
And tonight, because sleep will not come, because the dark holds me open-eyed and suspended above that country into which the defenseless go, insomnia, that old enemy, stands between me and the dream; it keeps me from descending where the memory might find me helpless, might put on its old face and speak in its old voice.
So tonight I will not curse it. Tonight insomnia is not the foe at the gate but the sentinel there, sleepless with me, keeping watch.
