You can sleep when you’re dead, but you’re not dead, and you cannot sleep.
We must walk around in black and white, being followed around by our shadow, our spectre, our only friend: insomnia. But where did all of the colours go, and why are we left with nothing but the sleepless bodies of our cries for help?
Being awake for too long may make you feel as if you’re dead—or that you wish to soon be. The many colours we usually see start to bleed from us, leaking like oil from a car wreck. Language becomes dull when trying to communicate the feeling to others, so much so that we may forget what orange, yellow, and blue are—they are simply words to us, forever lost and never found.
What is the exercise of speaking if what you are feeling has become white-washed and robbed of its colour? If we no longer see in colour then what is a colour wheel to us? Colours are not words, sleep is not death, and we must no longer let the spectre chase us; instead, we must do the chasing.
Blue like the ocean, the seaside, and the sky: let us not forget that these are only metaphors. They are ways of expressing things we cannot express; language tricks us into thinking that words replace the things they’re intended to represent, but colour is just a word. So, what does that have to do with sleeplessness, you might say? Well, I must respond with: what is sleep? Don’t be fooled into thinking that sleep, death, and ghosts of sleepless bodies are any different from each other. In other words, we only try to understand any number of these things through conventions of language, by attempting to understand the past feelings through the present, but all of those only exist through words, don’t they?
As we stroll through the days wishing we were asleep—or at least capable of it—does that mean we are trapped between sleep and death, incapable of either, yet somehow able to remember what colour… was? The truth may be that our language that we thought was capable of our expressions never held our colours to begin with, that colours have not bled from us, that we are only recognizing for the first time that we were always colour blind.
Rainbows seem like great things to work toward, but we have no control over the rain we must endure before the rainbows appear. Let us not be haunted while we’re still alive. Death is inevitable and, by virtue, so is sleep.