So, school was back in session today, after a week-long hiatus, and as usual, I got no sleep at all, despite trying, really trying to get to bed, before 12:00 midnight. As the hours ticked on into the darkness, and it was one o’clock, and then probably close to two o’clock, I lay there, watching the cars advertise their presence through their trails of light moving mysteriously across the ceiling. Their Dopplerian sounds waxed and waned, like waves coming close and receding into the distance, and I found them all madly distracting. Yet, they seemed friendly. Total and utter silence would have suffocated me, considering how awake, yet insanely desperate for sleep I was. I needed those sounds.
An asonic and aluminescent world would be death. I imagine all those spirits of the dead weaving about unsteadily through the utter and crushing blackness of non-being, unable to see, hear, feel, speak and touch. How terrifying! Poor things! One day, I’ll be one of them, unless, of course, I push off with both feet towards the stars.
The darkness used to hold terrors for me when I was young, and (shame-facedly, I admit) even into my twenties. My imagination peopled it with ghosts and demons, and even fantastical creatures out of Hieronymus Bosch or Michael Crichton. Once I dispensed with the fantastic or the allegorical, I thought that lurking there, just beyond my ken, were humans with malign motives. I used to lie awake at night, in my teens, after practising sitar or guitar well into the night, or reading and writing into the wee hours, and then trying to get to sleep. I’d pull the covers right up to my chin, and lie on my back. My theory was that if something or someone wanted to get at me, it’d have to look me in the eye first — then, it’d be slain cleanly by my vengeful guardian angel, who stood, alert and attentive, beside me. Fanciful, of course, and considering I was a spiritual atheist, laughable in the extreme.
Thus, the child gets mixed up with the emerging adult inside one’s skin. Magical thinking rules all. Reality is always out on a cigarette break, or rolling up its sleeves to greet the day effusively and maniacally.
Meanwhile, my child-self lay in bed, until sleep came, like a gentle mother or perhaps a lover, and soothed me, or took me into its arms.
These days, the darkness does nothing for me. Not much, anyway. I am not afraid of spirits or lurkers. Fantastical monsters have left my imagination for the nonce. I miss them at times. I have to be practical, pragmatic, pedestrian. No flights of fancy, or terror for me. I miss all that.
However, sometimes, I fancy I see a moving dot or streak of light between my half-shut eyelashes. A ghost at last, I say welcomingly in my mind. Then, I open my eyes wide, and realize it’s just a goddamned car on the road far below, tracing its passage across the ceiling. At other times, I smile at it, and say, It’s just those floaters and flashes of light you sometimes get, when your eyes are overworked. Go to sleep!
Or, perhaps, it’s a ghost.
I used to tell ghosts to keep away and leave me alone. Now, I miss them. Still, time enough to be one of them one day, if I so choose. They need a little oomph and goosing along to keep them from becoming despondent.
On the other hand, they might get too attached, and I would like to detach myself from everything when I die. I’d float away like a balloon into the outer atmosphere, and contribute my atmosphere to the rest of the thin blanket that protects the earth from death.
And now, it’s eleven o’clock, and I AM jolly well going to sleep early! I defy the gods of unrest to try and make me budge from my fell purpose.
In eight hours, I’ll be in school again, churning out learning and knowledge and fun and assignments to the assembled throngs. Makes one cheerful, doesn’t it?
So, goodnight, dear readers, if you’re there. And if you’re not, goodnight anyway!
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