In Continuum.

In the Land of Insomnia

I didn't sleep last night. It is 8.29am on the clock right now, and I haven't slept at all. My mother is blaming the cup of coffee I had last night while being out at the same old cafe. But I am pointing my finger at a series of things other than that cup of coffee. The things that I am pointing at include: That sodding lizard, the documentary I saw on Virginia Woolf, leaking air-conditioning pipeline, same mopey thoughts, but mostly just myself. When you have an insomnia, it's not about any physical problems, but it's all a matter of keeping the thoughts out of your head. But as a writer, you might as well chop my fingers off if you are going to block out any thoughts. After all, in the wee-hours of the morning, thoughts that come by are usually the most precious and original. I didn't want to miss the opportunity.

It all started with a badly timed lizard burp. Just as I was drifting off to sleep - finally - while dreaming about myself in a samurai showdown, the first click of a lizard's tongue caught my attention and dragged me out from my slumber. It sounded like the ticking of a clock, and slotted in between those were short and sharp sound of a different kind. The lizard must have been huge, and it was well hidden in the curtains as well. The sound irritated me so bad that I sat up in bed in the middle of the night and cursed it. But it's not like the lizard understood human language, and it started making weird sounds again swiftly afterwards, ignoring my threats of crushing it with my size 11 shoes. I tried to sleep afterwards, but of course the next thing came along.

Leaking air-conditioning pipeline can be a pain. The neighbor upstairs ought to get them fixed, because the irregular dripping from above down to my window is keeping me awake at night. I tried to count the drips, and lost my count somewhere between one hundred and fifty and a thousand. To make things worse, the dripping wasn't even constant, because if it was I could've fallen asleep a lot quicker. The irregularity made me anticipate the next drip, and because of the anticipation I lost the ability to fall asleep altogether.

I watched a documentary on Virginia Woolf in the morning, and there was something she mentioned in her letters that intrigued me. She said, that there isn't a day that goes by without something remotely interesting happening. And if those incidents are not properly described in words, then they are as good as having not occurred at all. So there was a craving on her part to record down every detail of every minute, afraid that those details would slip away. She was the kind of writer who defied convention, and at the same time observed the most trivial things in life with a sharp eye and of course, a brilliant mind. She used to interrogate her relatives and family, about the littlest details about their day. Her nephew was interrogated once about what he did in the morning. When he casually said 'Nothing!', she questioned him about what woke him up in the morning. To this he replied,' The sun that came in through the window'. She then questioned him about the nature of the sun. Was it a friendly sun? Was it angry? What sort of sun was it?

I started to think about the kind of details she placed into her writings, and her observations on life in general. The sad thing is that there are so many things slipping away between our fingers because we haven't the time to record down every little detail in our lives. Every minute has its beautiful moments, and our fingers just cannot keep up with those thoughts and observations at all. As I laid in bed, I attempted to write a little novel about my insomnia mentally, and I ended up describing everything from the sensation of the wind from the fan against my face, and the feeling of the blanket against my skin. The level of detail I was able to come up with, surprised myself too. And there I was, writing pages after pages about the minutes that went by, and in the end I found myself not being able to sleep at all.

No wonder Virginia Woolf once claimed that her best novels were written when she was in a state of insanity. Because to her, that opened up infinite possibilities with no confinements whatsoever. Of course, the price of that kind of detailed insanity was insomnia and headaches, and the former I experienced last night - first hand. A writer's insomnia doesn't make one feel sluggish like a zombie, but it heightens your sense to a point whereby every organ on your face is screaming at you with different information from all around. You brain become overloaded with thoughts and you start to fill those empty lines in your notebook up with words. To me, it was a fascinating idea indeed, to stay up all night with an occupied mind. But of course, it probably wasn't such a lovable experience for someone like Janice, who stayed up all night also all the way in sunny Australia to study for her test.

It was already six in the morning, and the mopey feeling struck. But I resisted against those feelings, and after about twenty heavy whacks on the head against the pillow and the repetition of fifty push-ups, those mopey feelings were soon replaced by the urge to be hugged. But of course, there was no one even if I took an early bus down to the old love's place. So I hugged my blanket instead, and started humming a random tune I made up with awfully displaced words like "Jellyfish", "Cucumbers" and "Prosthetics". I decided to take pictures of the sunrise, since it was going to happen in a couple of minutes. So armed with the camera, I settled myself down on tha balcony and waited, as the winds blew into the trees and woke up the early birds to feast on the wriggling worms.

And then, it happened. Sunrise did not happen today, because a storm came in and swept it away. I've always thought that a storm is the most childish of all weather climates, simply because of how stubborn it is at the very beginning, but loses its strength towards the end. The howling of the wind against the window always reminds me of a child whining about how he cannot blow down buildings with its mighty gusts of wind. And so he tries to blow them down with rain, and fails. Lightnings don't work, so the efforts go to waste and his strength is exhausted. The sound of the drizzles hitting the pavement is perhaps the wailing of the defeated child, banging his fists against the cold hard cement. The sound of the rain sounded like the child throwing handful of sand against the window, and as I chatted with Kenzie over the internet in the early hours of the morning, the rain fell harder and harder until it was hard to see even the opposite block.

It was a sleepless night of much thoughts and inspirations, enlightenments and realizations. I made up my mind on a few things, and I laid some thoughts to rest on a few things. But whatever the case may be, you will read about them in the upcoming posts. I am currently bubbling with both ideas and caffeine, so don't mind me if I sound a little bit on the high side of things. On rainy mornings, this is what happens when I am not melancholic, or when I am trying not to feel that way anyway.

I wonder if you saw the rain this morning, or at least felt it. Were you looking at the same piece of the great big sky as me this morning? I hoped dearly, as I stood on the windy balcony filming the following video, that you were. But of course, that was just wistful thinking, a foolish hope. You were probably looking deep into your dreams, thinking about the next time you were going to see your new found love. Looking at the way you crossed me out in your life, like the boxes on a calendar, I wonder if you ever look into the sky and think about me any longer.

Do you see that bit of gray in the clouds? That's me, thinking about you. Do you think of me, do you think about me still?

Probably never. Probably never.