The Insomniac Diaries: yearning for break of dawn

“The last refuge of the insomniac is a sense of superiority to the sleeping world”

 Leonard Cohen

“All bad things must come to an end”

 I read the line from the breaking bad poster stuck on the wall, just in front of my bed. I broke out of the comfort of warm blanket and immediately felt a twinge of coldness in my knees. I washed my face with cold water just to alert my senses.

I went to the balcony and thought about the various things going in my mind for the last couple of days. I ended a five-year long relationship with the girl, I thought I was going to marry and get old with. I had expressed extreme sympathy for a friend who became a victim of domestic violence. I resurrected a person from attempting suicide; I had a cousin brother in London who was battling with life with a blood clot inside his brain.

Words like guilt, love, expectations, frustrations, loneliness, mental tiredness and many more frequently used terms from the same genre became a regular part of my life and now I treated them merely as tools to express my emotions.

My life was like boxer standing in the ring and trying to defend the incoming punches, I was standing in position where I had no time to recover and get stable to give my own knockout punch.

I went through a lot of mixed emotions, guilt of not being loyal towards the person who cared for me, being a little selfish about my own affection, lonely off being not able to find a single person in my phone contacts to share my feelings with, sensible of not letting someone end his life just because he failed in his life.

I got restless, decided to get back inside the room to place myself again under the comfort of the warm blanket. I stared at the static fan and off-white colored walls and thought about the various nights I had spent thinking about improving my life and making it a better place to live. The very next moment another thought struck me, about how in all those aspects I was a miserable failure.

My life was slowly becoming an amalgamation of despair and sadness, where all I did was live my life in two images. One where I presented myself as a person of how the society wanted me to be and secondly the person I wanted to be. However, now come to think of it, we all are living our lives in the same pattern of duality.

It was not the lack of sleep that was turning my thinking process into a more complex system, it was the lack of hope. Lack of happiness that you get from little things you go through in life, the atmosphere of an early morning cool breeze, sunshine in the dawn, a moment when you see flock of birds twittering their way into the blue sky not worrying about the destination. People going for their usual morning walks and being internally happy that they are taking care of their body, The huge crowd assembling near the tea stall for their early morning tea, mothers preparing lunchbox for their children, that little kid crying his heart out in a emphatic way to tell his parents that he doesn’t want to go to school. I missed these small ordinary moments to be cheerful.

Photo by Zac Durant on Unsplash

When Life starts throwing random punches towards me, I should behave like the great Jake Lamotta- let it beat the hell out of me, but not be able to knock me down. With that thought, I realized how true the breaking bad poster stated, that all bad things must come to an end and so will my sleepless nights would one day see the end of darkness.