Insomnia

The night is cardinal – no, worse-
vermilion, like God spilled something
and never wiped it up.
It thickens at the corners of the room,
gathers in the folds of the ceiling.
Ugly gleam, too sharp to blink against.

I lie split open on this mattress
not a bed, a slab
a failed resurrection.
Sheets clench around me like debts unpaid.
My body, heat-slick and salted,
ferments in its own stench.
Not sweat. Not anymore.
It’s balsamic now. Thick. Acrid.
Like crushed strawberries left too long in the sun.

The mind ticks sideways.
No linear descent, just sideways rot.
Ideas gnawed through by weevils.
Half-scripted thoughts
about old debts, missed calls,
the strawberry patch I never watered,
the sound of her boots on tile.
Pointless. All of it.
Still, it loops. Still, I stay.

“Sleep is for people with nothing to regret,”
I say to no one.
I say it again.
Because the first time sounded too clean.

The mattress shifts.
A cardinal scream outside breaks
into three notes and vanishes.
Mocking me.
Even birds know when to shut up.

Time has no hands here.
Only teeth.
And it chews slow.

My thoughts turn to wine I can’t afford,
sermons I once believed,
the bitter rind of a prayer I bit into
and never could spit out.

The door in the mind that once led to peace
now leads to drywall.
A gate cold and shut as once in Narnia’s Frost. 
I pound it anyway.
Maybe out of habit.
Maybe because I hate the silence
less than I hate what I might hear.

The gift unearned does not live here.
Not anymore.
She packed up with the rain
and left me with dry lips
and a mattress that smells like something dying.

Still, I mutter it:
“Sleep is overrated.”
It sounds brave the first time.
It sounds like surrender the third.
But it never sounds like rest.

And the weevils keep chewing.
like a window left clean
after a long winter of grit and waiting.
Once, I felt it like respiration, automatic,
like morning pulling the world from its sleep.
I knew the shape of the words,
knew their freight,
knew the way they should settle.

But now they spill instead, mercury-fast, argentine-fleeing,
skimming the floor in slick puddles,
untouchable, unheld.

If there is a call, I cannot hear it.
If there is a name for this sickness,
it will not fit inside my mouth.
I only know that I should want the freight.
I should want the anchor.
I should crave the pull toward something heavier than myself.
But my hands are empty,
and my chest…

No, not that.
Not yet.
Not while the motes are still settling,
not while I still do not know which side of the ruin I stand on.

I have walked this road too long.
The world tastes better, feels better,
smells like pavement after rain,
sounds like the rasp of a match before it finds flame,
like a laugh caught in a stranger’s mouth.
It moves in ways I recognize,
bends like the way my fingers bend,
doesn’t demand I stretch into the shape of something
I don’t remember ever fitting inside of.

But God – 
(And I say that with all the exhaustion of a name called too many times in the dark,
a name that echoes, finds nothing, comes back empty-handed.)

God, I want to want to.
Want to feel it like hunger, like thirst,
like something that gnaws instead of something that murmurs.
Want to wake up reaching, aching, folding my hands without thinking.
Want to scrape my shins raw and not count the cost,
not check the sky for signs,
not hedge my bets,
not wait for the gleam to blink back at me before I believe.

There was a time I swallowed faith like raw honey,
let it stick between my teeth, coat my insides in its slow certainty.
But now it sours, curdles,
twists in my mouth like something I should have spit out
before it reached my stomach.

And I hate that.
And I don’t.
And I want to want to.
And I hate that too. 

So I stand at the edge of something like silence,
something like surrender,
and I say nothing.
Not a plea, not a demand, not a bargain.
I stand.

And then…

An exhale.
A murmur beneath the noise, beneath the questions.
Not an answer.
Not proof.
Just presence.

It does not fix me.
It does not erase the hunger, the fight, the dull insistence.
But it does not leave.

And maybe that is enough.

Maybe I can begin again.
Maybe I can move my lips without forcing the words,
maybe the ground beneath my feet is not as lost as I thought.
Maybe faith is not the thing I lost,
but the thing that waits
patient, steady,
quiet as aurora.