Observation #15, 11/15

(Theme: finding the danger in the ordinary)

                                                                                      

Sleeping:

Sleep looks at you from across the apartment. You can feel him sitting on the edge of your bed, his eyes burning through layers of plaster and drywall, matchsticks waiting to be blown down. He looks and looks at you and you feel the tingle at the skin of your neck, your temple.

No. You work. The screen of your laptop vomits technicolor noise onto the plane of your face and the sting of it keeps you awake. Still that tingling. A crawling. Something desperate to find a way into your eyes, into your brain.

He says your name.

Your forehead droops dangerously close to your keyboard, you jolt upright. Bidden, you go to your bedroom door, your feet dragging molasses-slow across cheap, coarse carpet. The knuckles of your toes are rubbed raw by the time you arrive.

Yes, he is sitting there. Tonight he looks like Hypnos, the way the Greeks saw him, nearly naked but comfortably so, sun-kissed and strong from some gymnasium or other exercise in the Elysian Fields. His hair is dark, curly, and entangled with the feathers of the white wings rising from behind his ears like a strange crown.

“Come,” he says, his eyes so dark there is no difference between pupil and iris, so dark you can see most of the room and all of yourself in them. Lost. “You must rest.”

Your stomach clenches, you clutch at the door frame for support, the bed is calling you to it, with him still sitting there, persuasive. No, no, you can’t and you won’t.

“You haven’t slept for four days, an eternity,” he shakes his head and his curls sway but his eyes do not move, do not blink. Dead eyes. “Mortals are not meant to wake so long.”

You know it can be done, it has been done. To never sleep again. To blot out all the dreams. All the dreams and every time you’ve woken up screaming. Screaming and bruised from remembered violence. Paul Kern did it in the Great War, you can do it now, with or without the bullet that left him forever wakeful.

He knows what you are thinking, can see it in the defiant definition of the muscles of your arms. “No. He nearly died for that exception and even then sometimes he slept with his eyes open and mind awake. One way or another, you will sleep the years away with me.”

In those dark reflections you see the door frame splinter under your hands as exhaustion comes on like riptide, a great current pulling you toward your sheets, toward his eyes, toward oblivion and into your suffocating, brutal, ripping, bleeding dreams and

He blinks.

Waking:

You are awake. You are fully aware, every synapse singing, every nerve ending searing into your muscles, but aching with the weight. The weight of the hours lost, the weight of the comforter, the weight of the day. You want to suck in a breath, to feel your ribcage expand, but the weight is too much. It is crushing. It takes all of your strength to even open your eyes.

You knew he would be there. He’s always there. Every time you wake.

A tall figure – he must be – insect thin and dressed in black, hunched tightly and face overshadowed by the darkness of the corner made by two of your bedroom walls and the ceiling. For his thinness you call him the Straw Man, and he is watching you. You can’t see any of his features, save for the glint of eyes from the occasional passing car outside. He never moves or speaks, just holds himself there on the ceiling and watches.

He doesn’t need to make a sound. The room is full of whispers. Though you can see him there the lingering sense of terror that accompanies him is all around the room, especially everywhere that your periphery cannot reach. Sometimes you think you hear the grate of metal or the sick slick sound of serpent skin on carpet, magnified hugely, coiling somewhere nearby.

These noises, the terror, slowly pass and fade. But no matter where you are, outside of this room, outside of this town, he is always in some corner. Sometimes you think the heaviness is a thing he carries with him, presses down on you so hard that you are drowning in the soupy air, but you know it is just the weight of your life, trailing after you, growing ever shorter, ever more frail; you know it somewhere in the back of your mind.

So today, like every day, you force your leaden limbs out from under the covers, strain against your own weight to sit upright. It takes an hour to stand. You turn toward the door, you can see into your bathroom. 

As soon as you focus on the sink the carpet extends out between you and the faucet, stretching impossibly, it’s miles away, you’ll never reach it, but you heave yourself forward, thirsty, reaching.

And the Straw Man watches you go.