when you feel so tired but you can't sleep

The Anatomy of a Moment

I step out into the cold, clear night, holding my thin coat tightly around my torso in an effort to keep out the sneaky breeze that flits through the air. I tilt my face upward. The western sky still glows as the fading light lingers, undergoing the transition between glorious, cloudless day to forbidding night.

But the night is not so forbidding this minute. It is awe-inspiring, causing the earth below to fall into a state of total reverence. The azure skies of several hours earlier have given way to deep indigo velvet studded with diamond-esque stars. Along the horizon, a lighter blue haze causes the imperial heavens to seem electrified, alive. This is a night for greatness, a night where one looks inside oneself in the face of the complete vastness and, while seeing the good and the bad, realizes that though they may not have done everything right, they’ve ultimately done the right thing.

As I stand, pondering life, trying to be introspective, I realize I don’t want to forget any of what I am feeling now. I want this fragment of time to be forever halted in my memory. I try to take in everything humanly possible. The smell of the air (crisp, clean springtime, fresh dirt and a whisper of wood smoke.) The light, chill breeze that gently moves my hair across my face. The beautiful, unnamable color of the sky and the brilliance of the few stars sprinkled against it. The glow of the horizon as the sun wakes the other half of the globe and, as I turn, the ominous black-blue of the night to come.

Then I solidify this place in time. I can feel my weight balanced on the precipice of change and the future is the flood below. I feel the tension of the assembled masses behind screaming for me to do the inevitable. Faces in the crowd: my parents, my friends, my teachers. Even I am among them, chanting with the mob “Jump! Jump! Jump!” Suddenly the ground beneath my feet is gone as I hurl myself into the void, arms open wide and head flung back. I soar downwards with unbridled energy, but as I prepare to make contact, I continue to fall, the water so close and yet never quite in reach.

That is where I am now. On the very doorstep of change. Falling and out of control, my goal always evading me. But this night envelops me and my mass of insecurities, reassuring me that I’ll be fine and above all, that I need to rest. I turn to go back to the warmth of my home, thinking about how nice it was to be alone in the dark.