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[99] The Melancholy Night 1 – Chasing Sleep

It’s 4:30 AM

I cannot sleep.

I’m in the grips of insomnia. Thoughts are fleeting and I no longer have the energy to make them stop. It’s no longer the individual thoughts that hurt me, its the collective pace of them all that makes them unrecognizable.

Only the feeling remains, the facts are aloof. I feel melancholy. For a time, that seems better. A nostalgia that is more sweet than bittersweet. I make stories out of my memories and I live in those memories and count the days that were better than…this.

I look out of the window to watch a raven land on my balcony, staring at me, as if it is telling me that I’m not alone. That there are millions of sleepless nobodies that she has seen. That I’m not the last one she will stare at. That she will… fly.

And so she does.

I watched her under the pale moonlight, merging with the anonymity of the sky, while I sit and watch the quite of the city.  No one around me is awake, or so it seems. I like to believe that no one is up so I can be whoever I want to be. I can be, me.

My tired eyes close and I start to imagine mountains rising from under this plain city. The wind becomes a bit cooler minute by minute. The moon sets behind these mountains and the ground beneath me, beginning to shake. A sudden voice lifts me under its spell.

I’m flying now, under the melody of a music that doesn’t feel unknown. It replaces the air with its sweeping soundscape and it gently mellows down as it starts to fade. It’s all in a delayed flash. I slowly begin to descend on the top of the mountains that just rose. The air is reminding of the hair on my skin.

The moon reveals itself again. The raven still gliding away under its pale light. Waiting to go to the last insomniac who is imagining a world that they can never be in.

It’s 5 AM, now.

I still cannot sleep.

Rahul Gaur

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21 responses to “[99] The Melancholy Night 1 – Chasing Sleep”

  5. Very evocative… I too suffer from insomnia, although I have been better since they put me on oxygen… I was thinking this morning of writing about my feelings when I cannot sleep; stars wheel in a midnight sky, etc. but you said it for me! So instead I wrote The Survivor’s Manifesto! 🙂

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  10. Very good. You have a great skill with words, and here you capture a feeling that seems very familiar to me, while being able to encase it in some pretty elegant yet surprisingly truthful imagery; it’s well-focused. I feel like awake at 4:30 am is almost exactly like that now that you have said it. That’s a good poem. Lol I also wrote a poem “4:30 am” (still awake) a long time ago (it was not nearly as good) so I am predisposed to enjoy this. Thanks for sharing.

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  11. You know… Sometimes you come across paragraphs that force you, to stand up and cheer on the top of your voice and applaud the words. And then there are contents like this, that you simply can’t sum up in mere words like beautiful. And the only justifiable praise would be a caress like gentle whisper of ‘…… Woah’.

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