In my head

The worst part of the insomnia is the memory.

There’s an old saying a teacher (one of the few teachers who ever cared to teach me anything, in fact) told me, a Buddhist saying I think he hoped I would take to heart. “The mind is a mad monkey.” To be completely honest, it is only in times like this where I simply cannot get myself to settle down and sleep that I truly feel that I understand it. But in the personal hell of the sleepless night the mind is more a rat terrier chewing away at some tattered old bone of resentment or shame or fear. Some ragged filament of loss or pain out of the vast stockpile of slights and embarrassments that the mind just will not leave buried.

When your past won’t stay past it becomes gangrenous. It doesn’t even have to be anything important or monumental. At the moment I’m remembering a fight I lost in ninth grade. Before that I was remembering a fight I won in college. Before either of those I was remembering a few hours spent drunk and sick in the incredibly small apartment I moved to when I was twenty. None of this is tremendously important. Hell, it’s not even remotely important. It’s almost meaningless, save for the rat terrier of my brain shaking these memories back and forth, trying to break the neck.

The only neck that feels like it might break is mine. Tension just builds and builds along the bones that trail down from my neck into my back. It’s as if someone was torquing up a spring with no way for me to release the energy. It goes beyond toxic, as I remember sensations and experiences long dead, that tartar that builds up in the brain made up of laughter behind hands and letters where voices should have been used.

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