hey you

I am so tired, and I sit and listen to the endless silence as the clock makes the quiet tick tock sound, echoing in the apartment. And I'm exhausted, and still I cannot sleep. I want to, but I can't. And it isn't for a lack of trying. The thoughts ricochet around inside of my head, and I still can't make them stop. I write and write, endless soliloquies that are dumped into endless files or trashed altogether. Letters unsent, and monologues unspoken. So many words and thoughts that I can't express, and wouldn't even if I could. Wouldn't know where to begin or to end, or even to try. Battering against my poor, exhausted brain until I finally collapse.

Minutes that turn into hours, which finally turn into days, and nothing changes, everything seems to remain the same. And yet, everything changes. I go through the motions, drifting through each day, as it turns into a week, then into a month. Knowing that it will turn into a routine at some point, and the pain will become an ache, and eventually will become nothing, just numbness.

And I look forward to that day, when I will finally sleep, and there will be nothing but numbness encircling my heart, as it was once before. Easy, comfortable walls, closing off everything. Comfortably numb.

It would be so easy, to take the easy way out. To take something to numb the pain with myriad medications at my fingertips. So easy to be the coward that everyone else gets to be. Why do I never take that option? Because I'm me. And being a coward has never been my way. But some days, I wish I was more weak. That I could choose the easy choice, and just drift into an easy oblivion, where the weak-of-will go, to make it all stop.

Comfort in a bottle, with pills, with alcohol, with *something*, regardless of what that something was. And yet I never do. I bury myself inside my computer, inside a journal, a notebook. I bury myself in work. Never the easy choice, a mind-numbing agent. I don't understand why.

And yet, still I don't sleep. Because when I finally pass out? It's you I dream of. Your face I see, and your arms that I feel. And it hurts, and it damages me. And it makes me avoid sleep, because it isn't worth the pain. I'd rather deal with it awake, than fight it when I'm vulnerable.

When will it stop hurting?