For weeks, which felt like years, that small room was the whole World and every thing in it.
For days, which should have been their own, one linked and looped with the next and taught me to shame the sun.
After one week, I found out that a bed was like an aging body; the more it was used, the more I could feel its once-sturdy frame bend and sag, and the squeaking grew and the metal groaned below my sweating skin.
After two days, I found out that a bed was also the most dependable of life rafts, which safely kept me floating above the forever-blackening sea, where I’d once sworn I’d take my last wet and feeble breath.
While this one-room World swallowed fears and held trembling hands tight, it began to whisper in the night; one wall repeated rumors it heard from its opposite: warnings of the Outside and all the dangers it could bring.
“Those you pass on the road will stare with the knowledge that you are out-of-place, that you do not remember normal,” whispered the plaster on my right.
"And the many men leaning in to corners of brick could yell or touch or chase, you don’t want that again, not again, right?” hissed the wall to the left.
No, I do not want any of it, I replied through a hazy dream.
After their whisperings stuck, I discovered that the notion and act of sleep had the ability to slyly slip away, no matter how hard I tried to hold on.
Sleep. Slep. Seep. Spl. Shut. Shh. Sleep? Silence. Close. Dark. Down…
When sleep became a habit of the past, anxiety became the habit of the present and the terror of the future.
For weeks, which were just one stretch of daylight, I did not know sleep, but I still knew the comforting space of World and the safety the floating bed wrapped around me.
For days, which were wholly lost and never found, alcohol seeped from my pores, while empty ***** fifths created new altitudes of the floor.
For months, which were truly months, I sat in the small World with depression’s darkness, and I found I could live with no real desire to see my toes touch the existent, dreadful ground.