Insomnia: Also known as sleeplessness, the difficulty of falling or staying asleep caused by a wide array of medical or psychological issues including stress, depression, and trauma.
Often do I dream of my father. Though I have not seen him, nor heard his voice in many years, nearly every night when I close my eyes he is there. There, in the house where I was unmade.
There is always the house. Always the cold pale blue of wild eyes.
In my youth the dreams of him were much like my waking life; I am a child, cowering in a corner against the onslaught of a rabid wolf who seeks to consume his children. And how the beast did bite. Festering fangs seep poison in my veins that will find root and grow. I was never so tiny as I was against that titan. In my dreams, I can’t speak. He has stolen my voice and it will take me a lifetime to find it again. I am reduced to utter nothingness, my strength stripped off my skin by the lashes of a forked tongue. With all of me, I hate him for making me so weak. Soon, I will come to hate myself for my weakness.
Out of spite, out of instinct, and absolute necessity I grow; contorted but uncompromising. I vow to myself I will never be weak again. I lie to myself until it becomes the truth.
Years pass. I am finally strong and I want him to know. In nightmares more vivid than any day I throw my father into the walls of the house until they break. I want them both to feel this. My fists pummel those cold blue eyes shut; he feels it. The poison pumps fetid and scalding, and I am too blinded by it’s rage to see I have become a beast–just like him. I have finally claimed my inheritance.
In those dark days of hate, my nights rang with thunder and a terrible war. There was never any semblance of victory. Each morning I only woke with a terrible ache in my heart; the wake of which hits harder than any pain we authored against the other.
My father may have laid the foundation for a terrible future for myself, but here I was…ever the architect, still building this temple to worship the anger I’d come to love. I will be a man before I tear it all down, going gray as I kill the god I’d learn to pray to.
The eyes he gave me saw the world with magnificent malignance, so I tore them out. With new eyes, I gaze upon the battered form of my old man. No longer the giant I remember, he is a small and frail thing now. In my dreams, there is no more war. In our armistice I speak with my chest, my words no longer dripping with the venom he put in my veins. I ask him questions, so many questions that even with my newfound strength I still buckle under the weight of them. I implore my father to help me lift this burden. I am begging him and he will not answer me. He has already given me everything he has.
He is mute. The ice in his cold eyes melt into a wrinkled, broken face full of such sad smiles and an undying pride that does not permit those tears to fall. The rabid wolf has final succumbed to it’s festering disease; this is defeat. He never sought treatment, because to admit there was illness would mean there was a flaw. Our curse took my father long ago ago; whoever that man is now, I do not know him. I only know the circle must be broken.
In my heart, I buried my father long ago. Whoever now wears his face, I do not know him. All that is known is it never had to be like this–but it will always be like this. That lesson has been lashed across my back a thousand times over, and a thousand and one times I forgave the hand holding the whip. I honor him, by curing the curse that claimed him in myself. Within the cemetery in my chest at his grave I lay my wreath of grief. It blossoms with petals of pity, and, in spite of my greatest efforts, an undying note of longing in a song I’ll never stop singing. I was not meant to compose only laments.
The dreams still visit me, drifting in on quiet nights when my heart has no vacancy. There is always the house. Always the cold pale blue of my father’s eyes.
Most nights I just fight the sleep.
ian gallows ©