“Do you have trouble sleeping?
Do you have nightmares?
Are you heartbroken?
Do you feel down?
Depressed, hopeless
Do you miss someone?
Do you find that things you once enjoyed
No longer interest you?
Are you lonely?
Are you always sleepless.”
These days I feel more mellow and faded from reality. I used to believe I was just a broken person, constantly battling with dark thoughts of vanishing, running away to the hills and forgetting about all of you. Sitting in a room full of twilight colours vanishing into my world below. Nothing really gives me comfort, the dreams of the future and wanting to go towards it. I just always think of that and nothing else. My mind becomes full of nothing, I am not thinking but I am thinking of a lot.
It’s like a dark windy void, nothing comes forward to welcome me just a bunch of clueless questions about myself. So I let the smoke fill my lungs and exhale. It glides thick against the darkness outside, I am alone standing here. I am sleepless, struggling to find a routine or follow another one I planned. It sucks to feel this way I think, but who knows I don’t know much different from this.
Is it the pain of my past, is the pain of my future or the pain of now that stops me from being alive, or am I living. Sleep is death, a rehearsal for what is to come in the future, a brief look into the void beyond. Waking up is being alive, but waking up is slow, it’s hard and it brings so many struggles, I wish I could just sleep again.
Sleepless.
I sit again writing mellow thoughts about my inner mind that I want to show to everyone existing around me but I don’t want to burden anyone with this so I write.
Who am I talking to?
The smoke glides away, effortless, beautiful and grey. The world isn’t black and white it’s full of colours but the most beautiful is grey. It exists in the area of the end and the beginning, it has no meaning other than mellowness. Being grey is my existence, the in-between of living and dying.
A cursed existence of being nothing or a blessed existence of thinking beyond what I should? Seeing everyone around me enjoying their days walking upon this rock, they seem to not think about what is coming, is that what separates me from them? I find their plain lives boring, but I find my nothing life tiring. Yet I keep living, is it the comfort of the songs that fill my head with beautiful rhymes that keep me going? Probably.
So many questions that are left unanswered and that’s OK to me. Yet that makes me feel awake forever.
Stop asking me existential questions of how to live, how to do things, because I do not know. You may think I am smart, a thinker but I am far from that. I am an impostor. Happiness comes easy to you, and it never comes for me. Yet I am happy, but I am sad, I am grey. I am the in-between, the nothingness of existence.
A slow dream appears to me, an idea of what to write, I soon forget it. I never grasp for it, I don’t want to remember it. I wish I did, because it would make my life so much easier, or would it? My life just is that question of always what if? I am not a person who will change the world, I probably won’t ever be noticed and that’s ok. It’s a helpless lie I tell myself so I keep going but I always stop. It’s wall after wall. Too many unfinished ideas and broken dreams. The helpless thoughts of being broken. I want to go to her, that one who brought me happiness to feel that again but will I even feel that with her again? The times changed, we changed, should I just forget her or keep dreaming of some illusion of her. Some people have dreams that last a lifetime, constantly changing them but mine always changes and right now my dream is to live. Yet to live seems almost impossible in my mind full of everything. I am sleepless, I am tired but I don’t want to sleep at night, it’s my only time to be alone.
I am envious of their smiles, of their simple lives.
I wish one day I can move past it but I doubt I ever will.
“Do you get lonely? Sick with anxiety? Can’t trust nobody?” he says to me over a beautiful rhythm, saying he has struggles sleeping. How did he get here? Why does his voice give me comfort, what are these emotions he awakes in me as I fill my lungs with a dangerous substance. Exhale. The smoke glides away and my mind empties. I trust nobody but trust so many people. Yet I feel alone.
This connected world is a lie, we aren’t connected at all. Nobody reaches out to do something and that’s ok. I don’t want to do anything.
I am lonely.
An album published in 2019, Sleepless in______ by EPIK HIGH. The collection of songs evokes all sorts of emotions. The part above is some of those. I wrote that maybe a year ago when the summer nights felt longer than the days. Much like other music I have spoken about before, Mono, Nijuu, this album itself speaks louder to me today than before. Ageing like fine wine, it seems to be a means to an end of my melancholic states. Sometimes when I feel Lovedrunk, or even wish for Eternal Sunshine, it plays in my head. Hearing the lyrics, but the track that sits deep inside is the intro, Sleepless.
The atmosphere created by the robotic voice, the piano, allows me to get lost for a few minutes. It is directly asking you, the listener, a question as if it’s your inner voice. To me, I sit back, and I answer. Not with my voice or mind, but my heart. We all feel sleepless at points in our lives, you might feel sleepless now. I was when I wrote the start of this piece, I still am these days but listening to someone else sing their own troubles about being sleepless is somewhat comforting. Like I said before, I always end up here, listening to this album. I guess to remind myself that I am not the only one who feels this way.
