Insomnia

Focused freewrite on the theme of insomnia. The beginning is based on my own experiences, I have on occasion got to the point of minor visual hallucinations, thinking I see small spiders and bugs in my peripheral vision. Not fun when you hate bugs.

Insomnia is a bitch. Especially when the hallucinations start, doubting your sanity is a nice extra on top of being too exhausted to care. Those little flickers out of the corner of your eye having you whirling around for the bug you're certain was crawling on the wall a second ago. Nothing like seeing bugs that aren't there to make you even twitchier.

This was the longest stretch of insomnia I'd had by far. By this point I'd normally have just dropped from pure exhaustion, and if I'd been in my right mind I might have wondered about that. I was too strung out to eat, or buzz myself up with caffeine. By all rights I should have been face down on the floor breathing in carpet lint.

I wasn't even thinking about how tired I was. Just numb, which I suppose explains partially why I wasn't so shocked about what happened. I was sitting numbed out with music blasting, twitching occasionally and swatting the non-existent bugs.

My fingers caught. I instinctively pulled my hand back and turned to look at what I somehow managed to catch them on in mid-air. Nothing. I waved my hand vaguely in the same direction and squinted, looking for cobwebs from those pesky spiders I kept missing (though I'm not sure how I made this leap of logic with a brain full of mush). But a few minutes later I was back to my vegetative state.

My eyes started to flutter closed, and I tried to push myself off the chair, hoping to get to my bed before I conked out. I stood up wobbling and waved my arms around trying to steady myself. My fingers caught again. This time, some vague sense of curiosity kept me from withdrawing my hand. Instead I peered at it, wondering where my fingers had gone. It was like they had been chopped off at the knuckles, but without the accompanying gore. I wiggled them tentatively and could feel them move, could see the tendons moving in my hand.

I placed the palm of my left hand against my right, and began sliding it forward, watching in fascination as the fingers disappeared centimetre by centimetre. I slowly spread my two hands apart and tried to peer between the two. It was dark, but that in itself was odd, as I stood in a brightly lit room. I pulled them farther apart and still all I could see was an inky black space between them. The space was almost big enough for me to put my head in and peer through, but just as the thought crossed my mind, I felt a tightening around my hands as though someone had wrapped an elastic band around them. I tried to hold them open and keep pushing, but my hands were quickly forced together and pushed out, leaving me standing looking at my fully intact hands wondering what the fuck had happened. My eyes burned, my head ached and I managed a few stumbling steps to collapse on my bed before I fell into dreams.