not sleepin
i think i romanticize insomnia. like it’s this tragic poetic thing instead of a slow-motion car crash. i’ve been up for two days now. the world starts to shimmer at the edges when you don’t sleep. it’s almost holy. i’ve been reading about lost songs again. the ones people dig up after decades, half remembered by forums and broken mp3 links. there’s something weirdly comforting about it, how people will spend years chasing ten seconds of sound. like we can’t stand not knowing how something ends. i get that. i do that with people.
back in college (eugh), i used to listen to this song, goodnight whatever that is, every night before sleeping. well, trying to sleep. the walls in that apartment were paper thin. you could hear every whisper from the next room. my roommate snored like he was dying, and there was a leak in the ceiling that dripped once every thirteen seconds. i counted. i’d put the song on and pretend i was somewhere else. anywhere else. it worked most nights. college was supposed to make me better. smarter. it didn’t. it just made me tired in a more specific way. i was studying communications, which is hilarious, because i barely talk to anyone now. sometimes i think about going back. reapplying. maybe finishing the degree. then i think about the smell of that hallway, wet paint and ramen and i lose the urge. maybe i miss the version of me that thought i was still fixable. maybe that’s what nostalgia really is.
i went through an old notebook tonight. the kind you keep even though you know it’s mostly garbage. found a half-written note to someone i don’t talk to anymore. i don’t remember what i wanted to say, just that i never did. that’s the thing with silence, you think it’s saving you, but really it’s just waiting its turn to be loud again. i keep thinking about the idea of a sound disappearing. not because someone deleted it, but because the world stopped needing to hear it. what happens to all the voices when no one plays them anymore? i don’t know. i should sleep. i probably won’t. song of the night: goodnight, whatever that is by samurai sword. feels like headlights passing your window. warm for a second, then gone.