Reaching for something

This is something I sketched out on 16th August but hadn’t gotten around to typing up. But then I saw the Daily Prompt a day or so ago, and even though it’s a little late, and even though this might not be exactly what they intended when giving out the prompt, I thought I’d used this as motivation to put this up!
http://dailypost.wordpress.com/2013/12/10/out-of-your-reach/
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Every night as I lay in bed I am overcome by the burning in me, the burning that stays dormant during the day. When the words and actions of people serve to cool and distract from the blazing heat, the soul-sucking black hole that forever remains on the verge of collapsing in on itself. Every day, while the world around me turns and whirls; I pretend to myself. I burn.

Every night as I struggle to fall asleep, I see you hiding in the shadows. Fluttering somewhere just beyond the darkness of my tightly closed eyelids. I reach for you but my physical hands feel only nothingness. If I could push my hands out from within my eyeballs and brush aside those gauzy, flimsy curtains and look you in the eyes, I would. As it stands, I see tiny black palms emerging from the blackness of my irises desperately reaching out towards you and falling back, struggling to emerge from the writhing, slippery mass ahead of the others, to be the first to reveal the truth – that which is all I seek and all that needs to be seen.

I find myself suspended in time, sometimes wondering if it is better to endure the steady fire in my veins than to try fruitlessly night after night in my quest to achieve the truth. I wonder if the anticipation has become so great that no matter what is on the other side of the curtain, I will find you wanting. I wonder if when you find me, perhaps you will find me wanting. Then I shake the thought from my head and laugh at myself because I know that for you, as for me, on the other side of the curtain waits perfection. That a part of me was placed into you when you were born and that without it, I remain a fraction of myself.

Yet, those days, days on which I doubt myself, disillusioned, I prolong the simplest tasks, procrastinate, waste my time and pray for swift sleep born of tiredness because I cannot face another night of empty searching.
Every night I lay in bed, eyes shut, searching into the late hours for you before sleep takes me. Every day I pretend; I pretend to be oblivious to the burning, to the aching, to the emptiness within me. I pretend that the pain that throbs dully behind my eyes is from lack of sleep and not the strain of trying to see into something beyond the abilities of my naked human eye. I pretend that I am whole.Hence, I am proved a liar, time and again. And my only redemption is in you – the truth I seek.

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