She had strung up the fairy lights in her room to add a little extra light
but it just means she’s less used to the dark now
Beds are always a little more comfortable
when they’re pressed against something
so she makes permanent grooves in the wood floor and
temporary scars on her knuckles when
they scrape across the wall
It takes minutes to do but days to get used to
she stretches out her legs and hits bookshelves
instead of empty space
She likes to sleep with her favorite writers looking over her
Dickinson and Bronte and
the dog-eared Harry Potter series
telling her to close her eyes and breathe easy
whispering sweet words from their shelves
She wakes up the first day
and forgets where she is
and once she remembers
she lies back down and tries to forget again
Mornings have never been easy and never will be
Sometimes she trips on her guitar when she gets out of bed
if she forgot to put it back the night before
Almost as bad as the twanging sound her instrument makes
is the tiredness of dry, itchy eyes
when she opens them after too short of a night
She can’t remember the last time she
woke up with a good night’s sleep
She runs on the coffee that she hates and
the sunrises she secretly loves
If she had a nickel for every time
someone had pointed out her puffy, sleep-deprived eyes
and hair matted from tossing and turning
she could probably afford sleep treatments
She once stayed up until one in the morning
finishing her Health homework, in which
she read statistics of the 8-10 hours minimum
needed for people her age
She laughs at irony and appreciates good jokes
and yawns at everything
Dysania
a state of unrest
a state of confusion
a motionless state
Even when there are days when she goes to bed early
Or those rare nights when her eyes magically
fall shut of their own accord
she still finds endless struggle in
the act of sitting up the next morning
It sometimes feels like a weight is holding her down
a giant’s hand or a giant handful of pain
coming from somewhere she hasn’t quite located yet
But on the worst days
when the world turned her upside down and shook out her pockets
when she couldn’t remember how it felt to be stable
and not constantly plagued with worry
when solid ground was suddenly missing and she kept stumbling
on these days, she could always take solace
in the one constant in her life
the fact that, tomorrow morning
she wouldn’t want to get up.
Poetry