Can't Sleep

I lay awake, unable to sleep, and all because I’m thinking, no dreading, of how it would all start again a few hours.

3 hours of shaking gigantic wooden blocks, again. Imagine someone had surgically implanted a mini automated gong in your head.

Yeah that’s how it feels.

Even now a dull ache throbbed in a distant part of my brain, from that HORRIBLE hollow clangy sound from those wooden blocks that always seemed to shake and throttle my very skull. The hollowness. Always the hollowness.

Seriously whoever came up with the idea of appreciating the sweet melodious sounds from the clamouring of wooden blocks should have their taste severely questioned. What is even more perplexing is that nobody seemed to mind it.

Not that I wanted to know why. I don’t care.

I dropped mine today and one of them ‘accidentally’ sent it flying across to the other end of the room. They parted like a red sea, the sound that poured from their mouths, sickeningly hollow.

And so I ran, well rather, politely excused myself, far far away from the hollowness of it all. Somewhere, something, that can fill the desperate chasm in my very soul. It’s always loudest when I’m around them.

The hollowness screaming its fill at me. I wanted to grab it by its neck. Squeeze it so hard that I can feel its windpipes disintegrating under my fingers as I pressed harder, harder. Telling it to shut up.

Just shut up.

I see its wide gaping mouth stretched obscenely, its empty eyes a silent plea, begging to be filled with something, anything, and in a moment of either weakness or pity, I slacken my grip on it. I cannot shut it up. I cannot.

I drop to my knees, helpless, tired, exhaustion seeping into every crevices in my bone.

Maybe I should just accept that the screams were meant to be my lullaby.