This Unfolds.

A helicopter flew overhead and I looked out the window for any sign of it, thinking how strange it would be to see it fall into the middle of the street, the rotors still whirring eerily slow after it came to an abrupt halt. I turned back to my book, searching for the line that I left off at, only to realise that I couldn’t recall anything written on that page. In fact, I thought as I flipped back through the book, I couldn’t remember reading anything at all. The words I was scouring over seemed somewhat distant, the names foreign. I picked up my phone to check the time – it was three-twenty. It had been over two hours ago that I had decided to go to bed, or rather to turn off my laptop in the hope of overcoming the need to incessantly check the three or four websites I spend most of my time on; and I was no more tired. I could still see the blinking light of the laptop, placed at arms reach from my head. I was always afraid to turn it off, afraid that I might miss something – anything, so I only ever closed the lid. I decided for the third time that night to open up the laptop, and searched for helicopter crashes. An hour later, I realised that I was trawling through news stories and articles from the previous day, wondering if anything new had happened since I last checked. I thought how stupid what I was doing was, and tried to put the computer away, only to open it up and do the same thing again. At five o’clock, I thought about watching porn, in the hope that some release may put me to sleep; but my lack of any semblance of a sex drive caused me to feel sick at the very thought. My mind was incapable of sexual desire. I thought about when the last time I masturbated was, but couldn’t remember. I turned the computer off, completely.

The room was dark. The light from the street lamp outside my window shone through the slats in the blinds and directly onto my face, but the room was dark. Without the light of the computer screen, or even the blinking light of the laptop, there was only darkness. I moved my head and rolled over, wondering why I always ended up waking up on my back, regardless of what position I slept in, or the fact that I couldn’t fall asleep that way. I knew that if I started thinking about it that I would never get to sleep, so I tried to stop myself. That never worked. I thought about going to sleep and never waking up. When I was young, I was afraid to go to sleep because you would never know if you had died during the night. I had panic attacks lying in bed at night, waiting. Whenever I woke up, it was always a relief to know that I was still alive; but that relief was soon replaced by the weight of anxiety about the impending night. I got angry because I knew that my mind was running away with thoughts again, so I tried to stop myself. My therapist advised me to do breathing exercises when I needed to relax or clear my head, but I found that this sometimes didn’t work out too well. I would clear my head of normal everyday thoughts, only for them to be replaced with those that I was most trying to avoid. Even considering doing breathing exercises lead these thoughts to automatically enter my mind. I knew then that I was not going to be sleeping anytime soon.

It was getting light outside, so I decided that I might go for a run to clear my head, and possibly make myself tired. By the time I got out the door it was a little after seven, and there were people already out driving to work, their headlights on. Seeing this, I was overcome with a wave of self-conscious anxiety and decided against it. I told myself that I would go for a run tomorrow – when no one was around, before realising that tomorrow was today. I went back to bed feeling more depressed than before, partly because I couldn’t bring myself to run in front of even a few early morning commuters, but mostly because I had squandered another night on nothing. Another day had gone by and I was no better for it. Nearly twelve hours had passed since I’d had contact with another person, twelve hours that I had spent alone and awake, and I could not recall a single thing, productive or otherwise, that I had done. I lay down, turned my computer back on, and lined up a few episodes of The Simpsons in a playlist.

I fell asleep, and didn’t die.