#2024MakeAMonster day 7: Insomniac

#2024MakeAMonster day 7!

Insomniac

That's the thing about insomnia: it's in your flesh. During the day it's like being sodden: weariness soaks me like a sponge, and all of me feels so heavy I feel like if someone shook me the meat would just drop off my bones. But let me lie down, and I'm crawling. My nerves come away and crackle ant-trails through my skin; wherever I touch the mattress, I creep with a skittering chant of can't, can't, can't. 

And yes, I've tried things. I exercise and have hot baths, and go to bed properly tired, and then lie down and find myself crawling again. Valerian does nothing but make my medicine cabinet smell of dead rubber; chamomile tea leaves me just as wakeful except now I also have to get up and pee sooner. I even got the doctor to prescribe me some sedatives during a particularly bad time; she gave me a suspicious look and a long talk about how these were addictive and had diminishing returns, and I said I understood but maybe if I could just break the cycle it'd be all right. I took them, and it was the same when I lay down: my skin crawled, just a little muffled as if I was feeling through a mesh. The next day I felt no more rested and my tastebuds had gone askew; there was a foul taste in my mouth as if a bunch of iron demons had been holding a farting party in there. That lasted the whole day, and I gave up the pills and just accepted that medicine wasn't going to help me either. 

You start to see things in the day. I looked into my friend Janie's eyes the other day and they expanded all of a sudden, opening in her face like camera-lenses until they were big as teacups. Then they were back to normal and looking at me funny. Words got stuck in my head and I'd hear voices say them in my ear, sudden mutters without warning: 'Pipette!' something would murmur, or 'Staccato! Staccato!', haunting me with jumbles of sounds that had lost all meaning. Or things would scamper: one minute I'd be trying to read a street-sign and the next all the Ms on it started flexing their legs. I mean their straight lines, I suppose, but that wasn't what I saw. I tried to read, and from within the words 'Memorial Row,' the Ms woke up and skittered off like spiders. And it's hard to keep your head up: I'd be sitting at reception waiting to answer the phone and it was like the muscles of my neck melted; down my head would drop, and then I'd snap to and jump back up, my nape prickling with millions of tiny feet.

I was full of ant-trails. That was the worst of the hallucinations. At night I could feel them creeping under my skin when I tried to rest; the doctor could tell me all she liked that it was an anxiety symptom, but I had nothing to be anxious about except that every night I had to go to bed and then I'd feel it under my skin, a billion needle-point feet pattering up and down me, under the surface, deep in the muscles where the veins laced up and down forming a branched lattice of roads for them to march along. 

I rambled. At work I put through calls and distributed mail and couldn't remember anything for longer than a few seconds, and people grew impatient, and I put on more make-up so I'd look like a dismissable bimbo and they wouldn't see the hollows under my eyes. And when I went out, dragging my feet in the hopes that exercise might make me rest a little better, I didn't really look where I was going. I bumped into people, but I was too tired to care. Maybe, I thought, if I let them crash into me really hard it'd crush some of the ants under my skin. 

So when I wandered into the charity shop, you couldn't say I planned it. I was following the droop of my heavy head, and the weight of it fell towards this place, and I was too weary to change course. I poked around, trying not to touch anything breakable; I couldn't trust myself not to knock it into smash. That phrase got stuck in my head as I dragged around: knock it into smash, knock it into smash, knockitintosmash, and it was mostly because I wanted it to stop that I put my hand on the shelf and picked out the bedding.

It was navy blue cotton, the right size for my mattress, and going for £5. I didn't know why I wanted it, except that I liked the warp and weft of it. If someone had said to me 'navy blue sheet from a charity shop' I'd have picked something dull and flat-looking, cheap dye that'd drain the colour from the whole room. But there was a kind of texture to it: the threads going one way were just a little bluer than the threads going the other, so there was a kind of depth in it. Criss-cross, said a voice in my ear, and I thought, Well, a crossroads might stop the ants crawling.

The lady who sold it to me was nice. 'It's a pretty thing, that,' she said. 'You're lucky; it sold fast last time we had it in too.'

'Had it in?' I was trying to keep my voice working.

'Last customer brought it back. Said they had sensitive skin, I think. She was nice about it, though; she didn't ask for a refund. Said she'd be happy to donate it and help us raise more. That's the spirit we like to see.'

I spread it on my bed. It had the musty smell of charity shops, but I was too tired to wash it. If it smelled of the charity shop then it didn't smell of my bedroom, where I couldn't sleep.

I ate a baked potato to weigh me down. I had a bath. I lay down on my crossroads sheet. 

At once I was crawling. I was used to that, but you can't get used to the feeling; it's an invasion, your body invading itself. I lay on the sheet and told the ants, no. No, you can't have my veins. Devils at the crossroads, devils at the crossroads. I've laid crossroads under you and you can't pass.

I lay there and said in my own ears, Devil at the crossroads. And I don't know when I fell asleep; time had unravelled itself for me long before. But I slept.

During the day I was a little more awake, though I was still terribly tired. I put most of the calls through correctly. I was still afraid to go to bed that night. 

I lay down on the crossroads sheet. Devil at the crossroads. The veins in my flesh prickled, nerves creeping, and as I lay there, I thought I felt the ants still. But they weren't dead. They crouched there, waiting. You can trap a devil at the crossroads, but he's still there. The land still holds that hatching across its back, and at the centre, at every centre of every crossroads, the devils wait. 

I slept. I dreamed of crossroads. 

When I woke, I wasn't rested, but I wasn't the sodden sponge I'd been. My limbs were moving like letters skittering off a road-sign; I showered fast, I walked fast, I sat at reception in an endless fidget. Rules say you have to stay there unless it's your break, so I didn't know how to move: I twirled my hair around my fingers, I spun my seat. I circled. 

That night I dreamed again. I dreamed of ant-mills. When one creature gets lost and follows its own scent, it goes in a circle, and the others follow after. Round and round they go, round and round, until they walk themselves to death going nowhere. 

I wasn't very surprised when I woke to find my skin full of circles. I'd been milled in the night. 

The doctor said it was a rash, probably brought on by stress. But I knew it was the crossroads. I'd checked the crawlers inside me, stopped their trek up and down my branching nerves, and now they had nowhere to go but round. 

That day I went back to the charity shop. I asked if they ever had a problem with parasites in clothes and bedding - not, I said, that I'd had any problems. But surely it must be a problem sometimes. 

'No, there's nothing to worry about there,' the nice lady said. 'We always make sure to wash everything thoroughly before we put it out for sale.'

I looked at her and I started to cry.

'My dear, are you all right?' she said, passing me a tissue. 

'I - I don't know where the parasites come from,' I said.

'Well, they can come from all sorts of places,' she said. 'But there's no shame it in. We live in a world with organic life, that's how it is. Just look -' she pointed out the shop window - 'there's pigeons on the street there, and they'll be covered with fleas and lice, poor things. It's around. It could happen to the best of us.'

That night no one saw me as I gathered them up, all the feathers, the dander, the nesting filth of birds. It was late, and I don't sleep well anyway. But once I'd lined my bed with them, I went to sleep like a baby. 

I had another doctor's appointment soon, but I think I'll cancel it. The fleas pierce me with their flensing teeth and the lice raise molehills where they've dug in and gone after the ants that I milled to a standstill. I wake every morning with bites, flecks of blood and little raised hills, a landscape of flesh that's finally casting its devils out, and at night, I sleep like a baby.