April 06, 2024: hot summer night and i'm packing my neocortex
written May 25, 2023; posted with clerical edits
sleepless nights in a dorm bedroom with one of those god-awful dorm room matresses, with metal being sprung right into you and no discernible padding whatsoever. its hot. its humid. i may have had a thai tea that day. all the cold that it had when i drank it is long gone now. is that why i cant sleep? because of the caffeine? why i'm not thinking about anything very strenuously at all but my brain feels like it's running like an engine, pumping blood through itself so fast i can hear the friction between my blood cells and the walls of my veins? surely not. caffeine makes you alert; everything is swirling around me and sweeping me away; that isn't alertness.
i'm begging whatever god is watching me and seeing me struggle and doing nothing to just relent and let me sleep. sleep is not something i'm craving, which is for the best; i'm never going to get any sleep here that could be thought of as desirable. it's just something that i have to get before morning. today was so long; maybe if things were quieter there would be less in my head to swirl around. thoughts of things which are important, but which are moving too fast to understand them enough to put them into words, rush by. a lot of things about how something went with someone else; thoughts which are in my head and in theirs and were once relevant to something big but now are left only to be flushed out by sleep.
tomorrow, i will fill my head with different things. and tomorrow night, i will be here again, doing the same thing i am now, trying to flush those new thoughts down.
happiness is a concept too difficult to be able to continuously understand throughout the day
but when i do understand it, and i am not flooded with exhaustion, i can see that it fills me
for a split second, i am happy. the next split-second, i am asleep.