I have this thought, that if I could outrun my yearn for sleep, stretch the nights into paper-thin sheets that pass second by dreary second, tomorrow would fail to come, and I would not awake in my bed, covered in sweat and pleading again for the darkness to find me. 

Maybe- I Think- Maybe if I could find just the right balance between exhaustion and alive, I could entrap myself in some self-deluded escape from reality, hallucinate vividly and come the dreaded daylight, awake a renewed person, a different person entirely- one for whom meaning is simply given or perhaps, is even unnecessary in every waking moment. 

But I have always failed at this.

Mornings have always carried with them the weight of a thousand mountains all stacked curiously at the base of my chest. 

They are the stark and overbearingly constant reminder that there is no back-alley reality to which we can escape.

"We are here, we are now, we are ever-so-flawed and inescapably on the path to the unknown," they say. 

So I trudge through each day, yearning to find sleep, rest, a place to be removed from the furious roar of existence and always, to no avail.

There was once a time when I had depended on the night's silence to escape. She was once my co-conspirator. But when the darkness comes now, she comes slowly, a thick suffocating heavy she brings with her, with which she forcibly cloaks by head.

She too has turned her face from me. 

I had made plans in her dark, wrote words, sang songs, set promises in stone or otherwise discarded them like useless scraps into the never ending abyss. My soul emptied to her, the hopes and dreams of the 5-year-old inside me, exposed to the bare earth as she rotated helplessly around the sun. 

Tonight she roams like a lonely beggar wandering an empty backroad, not even an echo to bring comfort nor even to instil fear.