Insomnia

Insomnia robs you of your creativity; you borrow the minutes from tomorrow to frivolise away today. Wasted moments, ticking away your life, tick tock, tick tock, trapped in the quiet, pointless moment of now when the world sleeps and you stare at the wall lost in your darkest thoughts as they carousel around your mind, maddening you.
Tomorrow half the day will be lost. I’ll be rushing around to do the things I need to do, squeezing everything in to deadlines because right now I’m awake, alone, half-cut and without a glimmer of a chance of sleep. The wine hasn’t helped, if anything it’s woken me up even more. My mind burbles and hums to itself and I’m lumbered with it. All I can hear is the fan in my lap top and the clank of the keys as I talk to myself on the screen.
What happened to my youth? I still feel young, but I’m not. Not by anyone’s standards. I’m thirty eight. I know thirty eight year olds, they look so old and yet I don’t feel old.
Should I? Should I feel my age? If so what should I feel? Surely age is the cruellest abstract concept that we put upon ourselves. Self imposed dictates of, where I should be, what I should have done, what I should have accrued and how I should act.
Physics tells us that time is relative. Time passes slower for a moving object relative to a stationary one. Could it be that a life time of quick fire thoughts and intense emotions have slowed my aging, freezing me in some kind of permanent boy-hood? Peter Pan-ing me in perpetual adolescence, feet stampingly obstinate and stubbornly refusing to grow up?
Why should I grow up, to become what? Stayed, cynical, bored and comfortable? Should I become resolute and acceptant of the world? Should I not thank my lucky genes for my boyish good looks and blag it a little longer? Or maybe I should just fuck it and do what ever I damn well choose, take the one life I have and stop worrying about it. Crowbar it into all the nooks and crannies of possibility just to see. Just to see.
After all, in hundred years who will care? Life is so short, almost shockingly short in the eternal scheme of things. Fifty generations separate us from the Roman Empire in all its glory. Only fifty.
Newton is only ten generations away from you. The father of science, who made the modern world possible, the man who set down the laws of motion, conjured gravity from mathematics and explained the moon’s orbit. He was rubbing shoulders with your great, great, great grandfather’s great, great, great grandfather. We are stood on the shoulders of giants but there isn’t much of a drop.
What of a mere two hundred generation? You fade into the back waters of human history. You predate the written word. You are one of the men that built Stonehenge. You plot the course of the moon as it glides over head. You have an inkling of its significance. You wonder at it, you set your year by it but you don’t know what it is.
A million generations and there you are, walking up right for the first time. You clutch a rock and you run from a dozen predators that could kill you with a single bite. You’re covered top to toe with fur, you speak in grunts and even though you use the moonlight to see at night you have never contemplated it, why it’s there or how it had become. It’s just light and your belly needs to be filled.
Day by day, one by one we all eventually become history. Our days and our insomniac nights, our heights of passion and depths of despair, all lost to time. It chips away at us, age-worn and spent we fall into the grave, still confused, still wondering and still bathed in moonlight as our eyes dim and finally we’re done.
When they dig up my bones in a thousand years and they measure my remains, when they count my teeth and sort through my grave goods, my choices won’t be relevant. Neither relevant nor in-fact evident save for maybe the odd scar on a bone, some tell-tale sign of disease or quite possibly a chipped tooth that would tell a tale of stupidity, reckless abandon or foolhardy childishness.