from a little thirteen-chapter book i wrote.
i think the poem itself is from 2006 or 2007.
down here the dirt
collects like undone
paper work and the
aging souls pile,
joined by bows
and ribbons
and more
curiouser things,
and i watch you
soar above me but
you never swoop
down here
for five days when i was sixteen, i didn’t sleep. i had insomnia. one night i stayed up late to watch the exorcist and i just never went to bed. i went out the fire escape attached to the bathroom window of my dad’s apartment and wandered the streets at five-thirty in the morning, waiting for the sun to come up. i wasn’t wearing any shoes. finally i saw it come up over the golden arches of mcdonald’s.
as those five days went on, i slipped in and out. some of the time i was completely normal, sitting in my classes or hanging around the pavilion with my friends. but i never really knew what was going on around me. nights were the scariest; they were, for the most part, spent sitting cross-legged on my bed staring at the cordless phone. i listened to a lot of really low music. i stayed in bed for entire days, watching (what i thought were) developing patterns on the ceiling and the walls. i don’t really know how or why it happened.
one thing i did do was write. i spent that entire five days writing. in those days i hadn’t yet figured out that it’s far easier to carry around a notebook and i used a three-ring binder. i kept it in my backpack. i remember that it was the only thing i brought with me for those five days, and that i never went anywhere without it. while i was supposed to be taking notes in class, i was writing. while i was in the park with my friends, i was writing. all through the night… yeah. writing.
by the end of it, i had written an absolute maniacal vampire story that i hadn’t even noticed i was writing. and i assure you, it was twisted. my deranged brain really had it going on for those five days. later, when i was healthy again, i went back, read it, and promptly destroyed it. if i had known in 2001 that eight or nine years later vampire stories would be an easy way to make a few bucks, i might have done things differently. but i didn’t know that. and besides, that story was fucked up. i don’t remember most of it now, but i do remember reading through it, being terrified that i had been the girl who’d written it.
i was amazed at how, in high school, we’d been so similar to an insomniac. even just a five-day insomniac. and of course, the scariest part about being an insomniac is that you don’t even know that you are one until you wake up — and by wake up, i of course mean find sleep.
looking back, i could have taken that sleeplessness and learned from it, the same way i could have kept that vampire story and maybe made some cash. if i had known how close to that i was going to come in my day-to-day life, i’d have made some changes. but you never know that. you never imagine, once you’ve finally ended a five-day sleepless nightmare, that anything like that will ever catch you off guard again. but it does.
and when it really really comes down to it,
i fucked it up.
