The Sleepless Moon

19. Imaginary insomnia

Trying to sleep can exhaust you so much, the feeling of being so close to the dreamland, but in fact, so far away, the dream never coming, always stepping back, and back, and no matter how much you stretch your arm, you can't catch it. It's coming, I think it's coming, that's what I would think when actually it's not. That I learned the hard way. So, that is the reason why I stopped trying to fall asleep, I can't. It's impossible. At least not at night.

Grandma was suggesting him to take me to a therapist, she was the reason why I tried all those pills, why I was being poisoned with them when they did nothing at all, but poison my body and vanish when I pee. It was all in vain. But grandma didn't take no as an answer. She kept taking me to a different psychologist, she was the one because of whom I would even stay at the hospital, do EKG more times than I could count, the night, the day ones. I'd been held in the hospital, they kept changing the medications, and do experiments on me as if I was some animal. The doctors would swear that this type of cocktail I would be given or medicine they put me on, was a revolution for the type of insomnia I had.

And what type actually is that I have? A psychological one. It's all in my head. I remember there was that one psychologist who said that I should just stop thinking that I can't sleep and only close my eyes. As if that was so easy.

Here's a thing. Each time I would go to a new therapist, I would become even more introverted. In the beginning, I would, I really would explain to them in detail how the accident happened, what I felt during it, and they would only nod sheepishly, and say some bullshit, and soon ask me to draw something. I was often asked to draw and even if I would say that I'm awful at it, they'd say it didn't matter because apparently, they needed to see something in my drawings.

Since I was a kid, they thought it was better for me to draw, and that my drawings would say more than I was able to, with the lack of vocabulary due to my young age. That, I remember I read in a book when we had psychology in sophomore year. Yeah, imagine, I read some of the textbooks, wow! Yeah, um, I couldn't sleep, I was bored, read all books that I wanted, so I thought why not take a look at this, and it was really interesting to read about psychology, though I knew better than to believe half of that shit. I could write a better textbook, but whatever, I'm too tired to do so.

When I passed through the hands of thousands of therapists for kids in Seattle, I stopped telling them a story of mine. That tragic story. The story that changed my life and made me a zombie.

So, I would just sit there, trying to absorb their offices, filled with just too many things, in all colors, with some shitty motivating quotes on which I would just roll my eyes. And no, not because I wanted to stay awake, but because I really wanted to vomit on them.

Grandma would scold me each time when the therapist would expose me as the biggest criminal for not wanting to waste time on talking in vain. Because there's no help for me, and that I realized even in the age of nine, two years after desperately trying to sleep, taking any pill color in each color of the rainbow.

I stopped drawing the craps I was asked to and started to act wild, for example, squeeze those papers I'd been given to draw on, tearing them apart and throwing them on the floor, yelling at the doctors who were sitting behind the desk, nodding and mumbling some incoherent words, while writing something in their notes. Of course, they kept fucking noting even though I would only yell at them, nodding as if they wanted to tempt me more and prove to others how crazy was I. But, they didn't have to prove anything.

I knew that I was going crazy. I could feel it in my veins, the madness boiling in my body, corrupting me and putting some kind of demon in me, in my brain to whisper me that I can't sleep, and to keep my eyes wide opened the whole night, not giving me a chance to rest as other kids. And even though I could feel that I was going crazy, I wasn't angry with myself. I had an excuse.