Confessions of an Insomniac

The crack in the ceiling is growing larger.  It snakes its way from the edge of the room to the light in the center, carefully avoiding my thoughts haphazardly stapled along the white surface.  At some places it flakes open like scales, exposing its smooth underbelly.  It is dark and blank.  I am dark and frenzied. Sometimes I wonder if it isn't a reflection, or some metaphysical transference, of what is going on inside my head.  I wonder if when it finally breaks open, will I break too?  I stare at it until it is some live thing; some angel, some demon, spreading itself out above me.  I struggle in the sheets.  I close my eyes and count to ten, to fifty, to a hundred, to a thousand.  The static in my head does not subside.  When I was little, I would lie awake in bed and think until my thoughts bled into some strange nightmare-dreamscape, from which I would wake up sweating and crying.  I would think about the fight that my parents had that night, or the fire that could start in the house and slowly consume us all, or the sickness that might grow in my mother and take her away from me, or the gunshots I had heard while on the playground at school that day, or the skating rink I couldn't go to anymore because someone had been killed in front of it...  Now my thoughts are sharper and have picked up speed, gathering momentum the more I become conscious of the world around me.  I think about the women in Juarez waiting for the bus in the dark, the flower workers in Bogota, the goldminers in Brazil covered in dust, the children with AIDS in Africa waiting for medicine that will never come, those being persecuted in Vietnam for their religious beliefs, the pigs in the factory farms who can't move and have never seen the sun shine, the dogs in the shelter waiting to die, those on death row waiting to die, those in the hospital hoping to live, those who are hungry, those who are abused, those who are scared, those who are ashamed, those who are depressed, those who live on the outside and can't buy their way in...I think until there are just words stretched out on to movie screens behind my eyelids.  I don't sleep waiting for an answer--waiting for the words to transform it all into something less painful, less surreal, less dystopic. Now the crack just mocks me.  I roll onto my stomach and bury my face in the pillow and count...to ten, to fifty, to a hundred, to a thousand...