Never Did Sleep Well

It's 4am again and this doesn't even phase me anymore because I've never been one to let Lady Sleep call me to bed at a reasonable hour because there's something that I crave when the night wraps its somnolent arms around my section of the planet that keeps my eyes open and I've never found it during the day and I doubt I ever will because I'm getting older and my hair is falling out and the world under the sun has fewer and fewer things that I care to envelop myself in beyond the bare necessities of life because I'm well aware that to wander the world like some sort of ghost isn't going to end well for anyone involved but those people drift farther and farther away and don't you dare tell me that we're not alone because that phone I pay too much for hasn't rung in months.

It bothers me to think that some people aren't in photographs in much the same way that I actively avoid them with my bloated, bug-flesh complexion and form because in a world where people take selfies by the hundred to show off the events of their lives it makes these secret people harder to relate to and much harder to market to because we're a little less than human and our stories will be gone after the moment passes because we didn't try to leave something behind and that's the sort of thing we smile at in our sad little ways with dead, empty eyes and make a joking remark about how it wasn't much of a story anyway and that is perhaps the greatest tragedy to ever be thought of because it's not love lost that breaks my heart but the idea that we aren't worthy of being a part of the human race so we stand on the sidelines because even then we just want to see what it looks like to be alive for only a moment.

I've watched the world and it's something I've enjoyed because if I don't stop to notice the too violet plants and the flowers I'll wonder to myself if the world is as grey and empty as I think it is most of the time in my cynical mind that spends too much time wondering if my senses are fading or if it was all just a dream and my memory gets faulty and I forget what it felt like to be taken into a stranger's family for a weekend or to be the only person walking through the open air market blocks long after the only company I have are the snow flakes and the lamp posts and my thoughts and the music that drove the demons out of my head because those creatures were old and my music was just too loud for their comfort and now I live so very far away from all of those things and I start to wonder if this is really all there is to life and if, perhaps, it is the only thing that truly does exist because I'm no longer there to feel them and I become so self important that the world collapses away leaving only myself and the tiny little box that I navigate in my broken, sleepless cycles.

I eventually give up because my mind starts to splinter and the nagging thought that if I just went to bed I'd never walk over the rough, uneven path that magically appears out of history between buildings and it'd be so much easier but I know that I'd miss that sizzle of magic that I should have let go of a long time ago when I realized there was no happy ending but it drives me to leave crumbs that no one will ever see so that maybe, just maybe, a hundred years from now when I'm long since dead and scattered to the winds there will be another person who finds my bones and thinks my thoughts and doesn't feel quite so alone even if in their hands they carry bits of broken threads and a phone that never rings and a thousand other reminders that not everyone turns out to be the hero or the villain of their lives.

Sometimes it's enough to watch them run by. Sometimes it's just enough to have witnessed it.