Insomnia Monologue

I've been finding myself lying awake more and more recently, tossing and turning and tangling the blankets, unable to sleep. Getting into staring contests with the shadows pooled like ink in the edges of my room. Now, insomnia is a problem a lot of folks have, and I’m certainly no stranger to it. Stress, problems- kids, bills, the corrosive apathy of suburbia- they fester and rot in the recesses of my thoughts, and the sleeplessness lets itself in through the holes all that shit eats away. Just like maggots picking at a dead dog on the highway. So yeah, I've shared my bed with insomnia plenty, but this time, the fella that comes knocking at the door to my bedchamber is different. The obstacle standing between me and sleep isn't some nebulous haze of anxiety and regret, it’s got form and substance in my mind’s eye, …show more content…
Those survival instincts are hardwired, and they’ll kick in when you don’t need it. I’m sure you’re familiar with it-you’ll be sitting there getting chewed out by your boss about something or the other that you fucked up, when suddenly your thoughts come to a crashing halt and the lizard brain starts screaming at you to run or fight, and you just sit there paralyzed, torn between that base urge to live and the conscious reality that you’re not at any risk of dying. Now, I've been rambling on quite a bit, but you need to hear it if you’re gonna understand why I call the thing crouching in the corners of my psyche the lizard. When it turns up, slithering into the corners of my vision and blocking my eyes from shutting, it twists itself out of that ancestral, reptilian mind we all share. Its body scrapes away at my capacity for conscious thought and it exhales primal fear. Every night I spend with it, the drive to get out of bed and bolt gets harder to ignore, and the lizard gets clearer, more realized,