Nowhere
I’ve been awake for a few nights now. Not insomnia—I’m awake on purpose, just choosing not to close my eyes and slip back into the regular world. There’s a zone you find yourself in when you do this, where time becomes this thick, patient thing. The dark stops being empty and starts being full. You find yourself in a place that wasn’t supposed to exist, a gap in the architecture of things, and you’re the only one who’s seen it. Like God looked away for a second and left the door open.
So I’m sitting here in this nowhere with my thoughts scattered all over the place. The ones that don’t come in dreams because I’m not dreaming—just the raw ones, the ones about dying and wanting things and what we’re even doing here. About girls and sex and the future, all mixed together into something that doesn’t quite resolve. About life as this weird amusement park where you try everything once because time’s bleeding away and then it stops. You know it won’t matter by Tuesday, but you go anyway.
The strange part is that I’m okay with being alone in this. Actually more than okay. There’s something clean about it, something honest. Everyone else is out there wrestling their problems, desperate to be noticed, and meanwhile I’m here in a place that probably doesn’t exist, waiting for someone to care that I’m standing here. No one’s coming. Not my friends. Not anyone worth mentioning. Certainly not God—he checked out a long time ago, if he was ever actually in the room.
I’ll sleep eventually. Or maybe I won’t, and this becomes the new normal. The further in you go, the less the daytime world makes sense anyway. It all starts to look like a movie someone else is watching, rules that apply to other people. And me, I’m in a parallel space that runs underneath everything, where nothing has to make sense and no one’s checking if you’re still breathing. It’s the best place I’ve been in a long time, which says something pretty dark about the state of things. Or maybe it just says something about me. Doesn’t matter much at this point.