Sleep

Sleep,
It's tough
isn't it?
I want to sleep.  I need to sleep if I'm to get up early.
If I'm to be a good person, I need to sleep.
Otherwise, I'll sleep in and
I won't get the things done I need to.
If I don't get the things I need to done then I'll never move forward.
If I don't move forward I'll never meet any success.
Without Success Everything will fall apart.
Without anything I'll fall apart.
Without myself I'll not
know what to be.
Without knowing what to be
everything I'll say will be a lie.
Eventually everybody will notice everything I say is a lie.
When they notice they will cease to listen to anything I say.
When they stop listening to me completely I'll be alone.
When I'm alone I'll have to
change.
Again, I'll have to change who I am.
I'll have to reconfigure all the different parts of myself.
I'll have to piece them back together into a different shape.
When that shape comes together I'll have to make sure there are no spare parts.
When that shape comes together will people believe it?
If they don't I'll have to start from scratch again.
Will I be the same person I've always been?
Will people see that person as the same person as the person I knew before?
Can everything I've been be the same
as everything I desire to be?

I am certain that I began my life lying.
This makes me call into question everything that I've done up to this point.
I remember as a very small child, feeling sad and alone, attempting to call upon my great grandparent's guidance.  I remember asking them wether or not I could live my life as a female while I was born as a male.  I remember them coming to me.  Pulling out of the ether.  I remember, vividly seeing them.  I remember seeing my great grandfather as a shapeless white form.  He stared at me, two empty spots for eyes.  This memory was in my first house.  Where my parent lived before we moved, when I was in first grade.  I remember looking into the emptiness of the eyes of the ghost I had summoned.  I remember them staring at me.  I had blocked up the two windows that were above my bed.  I had sealed up the door to my room.  I wished for no light from the external world.  The white formless great grandfather, long dead, stared back into me.  I had wanted it there for guidance.  I had desired to call it for answers.  When it arrived I was terrified.  Just empty eyes staring back.
It offered me no guidance.  It offered no council.
I felt nothing but terror as I stared back at it.  It lingered so long.  It stayed there unmoving for the rest of the night.  It had no answers for me.  It wouldn't speak with me.
For years after that I would try to block out all light in my room.  I tried to block out the light as if that were what had called that specter into existence.  As if that would make it come again.  I blocked out the light to make the things that I now saw disappear.  I now saw horrible things.  I now saw disfigured bodies.  I saw them linger.  I saw them stay in my room.  I couldn't chase them away.  I needed to let them stay.  I needed to give them a place to stay.  I saw people who were so completely disfigured that it made me queasy.  I could feel my stomach turn as I looked at them.  As I lay there in the absolute darkness I had procured for myself.  A darkness which they borrowed from me.  I saw them in all their horror and they always stared back at me.  They looked back into my eyes but out of respect they never moved forward.  When I saw them they stopped.  They wanted to be seen.  Not because they were disfigured but because no matter how you look you want to be seen.  No matter how good or bad things have been you want someone to know.  You want to be seen.  So, for years they came to me, to be seen.  I could not forget them, as a courtesy.  And as a courtesy to me they never moved closer.
I remember the one I saw most often.  He would come closer than the others dared to.  He would stand about two arms lengths away.  His body was always turned to the side but his face was always turned toward me.  The left side of his face, my right, was smeared away.  Behind him an ever changing cohort of destroyed people.  One of his eyebrows was gone.  His hair was pealed back on the disfigured side.  I was never sure but it seemed he was a burn victim.  And though only half his face had burned away he had not survived.  He is, to this day, why I'm afraid of getting burnt.  I worried at times that someone had ignited his hair and that was why he was missing half of his face.   His cheek on one side burnt away with everything else.  It left his half of his teeth so visible.  The muscle damaged and remaining only in strings.  When everything went, half his face went with it.  But if his face had been burnt by his hair lighting on fire it was not what killed him.  His chest was caved in on one side.  It left less than two lungs in his body.  Whatever it was, it left only half a heart.
And even now I write this in homage to him.  To remember him forever, in return for him never moving closer.  I feel a terror.  I see the movement of a shadow out of the corner of my eye.

Only when I was in college would I learn about how blocking out all light to the eye can cause it to hallucinate.  I would read about the Ganzfeld Effect.  A curious truth, whereby a human can block out all inconsistent information to the eye and induce hallucinations.  I would remember all the painstaking measures I would take to block out all light into my room, in hope that I would not have to gaze upon their disfigured shapes.  How I wished not to see or disrespect them.
Blocking out all the light and never being able to sleep.
Staring out into darkness for hours.
Causing the very thing I feared most about sleeplessness.