Still Life

You can’t sleep, again. It’s the third night in a row this week. Fourth, in fact, if you counted the week beginning from Sunday. But you don’t; that would only make it worse. 

It feels like hours have passed while you’ve been lying. Uncomfortable. Awake. Still but not quite…still? You know what you mean. 

Hours since you switched off the light and clambered in, creating a space between the mattress and the sheet for your own body to fill. Left flat, obsolete, otherwise. Sighing, feeling the slight rise of your rib cage as your skin touches the cotton underneath in an ever so slightly different place each time your lungs inflate and deflate. Reminding you of your body. Of your life. 

You grope through the darkness that envelopes you, your hand poking through the air beside your face, to the side of the bed you no longer share with anyone. In the immediate darkness your hand meets the mess of things that lie jumbled by your pillow, entitled, more than you yourself are, to their own side of the bed. 

The books, unrelated to one another, that you’re nevertheless endeavouring to read in tandem, lie haphazardly, forgoing any semblance of a stack. The bottle of nail varnish you use to coat the chipped colours that linger at the ends of your fingers. Headphones, lip balm, a hand cream to stop the cracking of the skin on your knuckles in winter before it starts, and plasters to cover up the bleeding when you remember you forgot. 

Your hand, beginning to show the first dry signs of self-neglect, each year like clockwork, feels out your phone, lying amidst the pile of things. You encircle it, raise it, turning your head to assess the time on display. Too bright. Too soon. Only ten minutes later than the last time you checked, and only half an hour since the time before that. 

You feel a disturbing, futile sense of dismay, and you let the device fall from your hand, back into the jumble of cords and pens and a notepad you inherited. The one you’d intended to use for recording dreams, but which so far had seen only those belonging to another and shopping lists. Lists that don’t belong to you either, although you’d consumed many of the things they housed. 

Instead of dreaming you’ve been thinking. Not asleep long enough, nor awake forcibly enough, to do anything but. When you do manage to sleep, to slip under, to close your eyes and, genuinely, see nothing, you wake only to feel exhausted once more. The couple of hours you’ve coveted almost worse than the minutes you’ll pass without, or the nights that you’re unable to submerge yourself at all. 

When, if, you do wake, the surface of sleep, fragile, flimsy, is shattered by the insistent sound of the day. Both its beginning and, regrettably, it’s beginning. This sound that seeps, no, slams itself, through your subconscious. It is harsh, incessant. Your hand silences it, but still it remains, picking at the back of your skull, hidden beneath your pillow, where your fingers can’t reach in to pull it out. Squish it down inside of yourself, silenced for good. 

You sigh, again, and heave your body, heavy with the weight of being awake, over to the edge of the bed. Swinging your legs round, you stand up, take three steps, and switch. The light streams overhead as you step, lean, peer in at your own reflection in the full length mirror. Observe the blemishes on your skin, and the nest of hair that strains at your crown, restrained, or constrained, you’re never sure which, by elastic. 

Your face makes you look older. Your features young but hardened, more…robust. Less…open. Not wiser, necessarily, nor more restrained. Rather, more insipid. More exposed. More verbose but somehow containing fewer and fewer things to say as the mornings come, and the nights stretch on, and the days, inexplicably the days, keep passing, and passing, and passing. 

The dark circles under your eyes seem darker, and more circular. More pronounced than they were before. When you’d been staring at yourself in the mirror above the sink, your hand moving a brush up and down and around your teeth, they’d seemed more like bruises. Somehow that had been better. The bags like shadows, something that might still fade, with time. Now, you realise, you feel permanent.

You remind yourself that, before, when you’d been failing to find the light in your own eyes, you’d also been looking at your arms. Assessing the way they jiggled now in places they hadn’t before when you held them up to the light. Clawing at the fat on your stomach, your fingers leaving harsh red marks on your skin that won’t bruise, you know. You turn out the light, sick, again. 

Ten minutes later and the light is back on. Your body is back up. Your mind is still in front of your reflection. Your hands, with knuckles that bleed in the winter, are rummaging through your backpack and your stomach is folded in two, no, three, neat, large, fleshy layers. You want filters. Filters and papers. You want, no, you tell yourself you need, a cigarette. 

You’ve been told, you know, that nicotine is a stimulant. Told by a medical professional, well, he will be soon, that one of the worst things you can do when you can’t sleep is to light one up. You’d rather some of the good stuff, the strong shit, the grass that will actually hit. But that would knock your body out of your mind, and unsettle your dreams until they tilt. Plus, your mind tells you, tells your hands, still rummaging, that you need to go to work tomorrow. Today. Whatever. 

One more sick day and you’re done, she’d said to you. Prick. She hadn’t seemed so threatening, hadn’t minded so much about you being late for your shift, if it meant a few more seconds of your lips. Pressed against hers where no one else could see. Pressed against other things it hurts to think about now, but the feeling of which made you feel more alive than you’d ever been before. At the time. 

More desired, more needed, than you’d ever felt about yourself. 

You snap, painfully, back out of that moment and re-enter this one. Your lips now kiss a cigarette instead, balanced precariously in the space between, and you drag, taking in all of the air and the toxins, feeling the dust as it settles and forms as a hard, solid cage, fitting like film to your lungs. Just as you feel you might be able to stop this time, your lungs strain desperately at the cage. Painful. Screaming. And you, reluctant, exhale, releasing it all back into the space, the air, that hovers in front of you, as if the burning hasn’t harmed you. As if nothing can. 

You feel yourself, perched, the hard ridge of the window ledge that spans the far wall of your bedroom digging into your cheek. You’re breathing, as the ridge digs in and the cigarette smoke clumps into your blood, becoming a part of you for as long as you’ll remember. And all the while your feet are just, dangling. 

Your hand, now balancing the flame between your fingers, seems too white, too pale against the dark of the night. Too close to the burnt orange heat that you hold dangerously close to your mouth. 

Again you breathe in, and take in the night, the outside, of yourself and your bedroom, all the things that go beyond you, the world beyond your bedroom window, unreachable to your fingertips. Impossible to lock out completely, although you’ve tried. You’re trying. You can’t. You exhale. 

In the house across from you, the one on the street behind, there are lights, each room illuminated by a glow to indicate that still there is life, while you watch, a still life. Awake, you note. Cognisant. You wait. 

Then, chucking the cigarette down below you, you look after the flame as it falls. Silent as it hits the floor, you imagine, too dark to see that far down. After a moment you try again, close your eyes, take a breath, and eventually, in the darkness of the night, you fall asleep.