What is this bare horror that comes around like clockwork, and yet unexpectedly? Unexpectedly because I did not prepare, somehow I thought this time would be an exception, and I didn't foresee it. And yet it came, the bare horror. It came at night, as it usually comes, at retiring-time. That is when the monster makes itself known, when it's time to sleep. This horror, this monster, is felt and experienced as a void, a frightening space, a lack. This absence is almost felt like a presence, something which has intruded into the room, but also, somehow, something which has always been present, and was merely covered, as with a flimsy bit of cloth, which time itself naturally dislodged in the course of day-to-day events, revealing it suddenly and starkly.
It is cyclical. This horror, this monster, this ghost, this phantom, is frightening and yet not ugly, not ghastly, not exactly ugly. She isn't an ungainly black dog. She's a sweet void, a smiling ghost, a mocking phantom, a terrible demon. She comes unbidden at night and enwraps me in arms which are no arms, and kisses me with horrible air kisses, that miss their target. She is the woman that does not come, whose presence is felt as an absence. And the tiniest bit of anguish I can wrench from within allows nothing to show on the surface.
How does she affect me, the woman that is not there, who doesn't visit? Simply, I find myself unable to sleep. The night bothers me, the night itself, not the darkness, but something about the night irritates me like an itch, its void, its silence. Perhaps its emptiness.
What do I need then? And what will stop this influence from flowing in, from ebbing in like a murky tide? I need incident perhaps, to be kept busy. Glad voices and cheerful faces around me. And sincere faces, soulful faces, voices capable of feeling and expression and truth. All that can put the phantasm to flight, she becomes jealous, restive, and finally she dwindles to nothing. It is the emptiness that makes her strong, and the silence that embodies her. That emboldens her to give me that embrace which is no embrace.
I go to bed. I turn on my pillow. My pillow suddenly seems hideous and unbecoming. I know quite clearly that I shall not sleep, I have known it for hours. But whether it is a decision that proceeds from me, or some response to external stimuli, or some physiological consequence of having ingested something or other, I do not know. Perhaps it is worry, worry over work left undone. But I thought I had reached an age when I had conquered that, and I think I have, largely. I am not prone to stress, and it is not stress that keeps me awake. It is the persistent and worrying feeling that I haven't lived. It is the subjective feeling that haunts me, that something has been left undone, and with that feeling comes doubt, plaguing doubt, and on its wings, multiple and multiplying thoughts. And she is there, the phantom of No Sleep, she is there again as usual.
She never leaves me alone for long. I thought I was rid of her, having suffered from her presence in the summer, and struggled through many nights of suffering and wakefulness. But we're a month into autumn now and she has come again, inevitably, though I didn't foresee it somehow. Somehow I never do. For a few nights, she is there, sitting on the bed, standing in the corner, silent witness to my tumultuous thoughts. What is she? She is a lack felt as an object, she is an absence felt as a presence. She is the space where the phenomena ought to be, the banal phenomena that makes life liveable. How I loathe my own susceptibility to such weakness, to so many clichés, how disgusted I am by the banality of my dreams. Can it be that I, I, who have conquered life, who has figured it out, who was so independent and so haughty, and with every good reason, can it be that I have fallen into the contemptible weakness of solitude, an affliction I cannot afford to suffer from?
And I turn upon myself, as upon a stranger, and see this contemptible weakness declare itself insistently. Just like a common mortal, I am afflicted after all, with petty, mean wants, that I can't quite forgive myself for entertaining, as though I had found myself to be infested with lice, or nits in the hair, after all susceptible to the common ailments of the common herd, and what's more, I was so prideful and stuffed-up and conceited that I haven't taken the time to build up a resistance to these common ailments, which some superstition tells me could have been accomplished by a letting go of ego and a common humility, but instead, I immured myself behind walls, walls of selfishness, and deceived myself into thinking I was free and independent. What a thought: I shut myself off behind walls, mocking the crowd, and afterwards suffered for it when the crowds finally departed, leaving in their wake a vast silence.
This silence! What is in it?
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