Trance for Insomniacs

by J. C. Runolfson

We are an army unarmed
with anything but the nightmare
of unsleeping,
the way time
e
l
o
n
g
a
t
e
s
and us with it,
stretched thin in weariness,
wide-eyed and staring
at a dark that stares back.
We'd like to be the ones to blink first
is the hell of it.
Let others be acquainted with the night,
I want familiarity with the insides
of my own eyelids,
something better than the interrupted
frissons of slumber I manage
featuring foreign films
where my memories should be.
I first heard the word oubliette in a dream,
and though I have never studied French,
never wanted to,
I knew precisely what it meant.
It is the state of your mind
and the secret to sleep
and the key to that secret that you mislaid
somewhere after you hit puberty.
It is the way doctors look past you
and so many friends recount
gleefully
all the things they could do back in college
when they didn't sleep for days on end
and they can't do that now, no,
even if they want, there are children and careers,
responsibilities,
and they forget to ask
how you manage those things
when sleep is not an option.
It's that way,
straight
d
o
w
n
the hole,
the only way in,
the only way out.

If sleep is for the weak,
then why do I feel fragile as crazed glass
at 3AM when even my house seems to
doze around me?
I am not stronger for this.
I am not blessed.
I am weighing down
the planet
weighed down
by the planet
s
t
r
e
t
c
h
i
n
g
until I break
or snap back.
There is no door number three.
There is no door.
This is the oubliette.
This is the hole,
rabbit and fox,
and we, the unsleeping,
the nightmare army
at the bottom of it.

---

J. C. Runolfson's work has appeared in Stone Telling previously, as well as Strange Horizons, Mythic Delirium, Goblin Fruit, and many others. She is also a freelance editor and critic. She is disabled due to chronic illness; one of her symptoms is severe insomnia.


Photography: Insomnia, by Alyssa L. Miller.