Breaking a Bad Spell

I can’t sleep — it‘s eating me up. Again. I should date this? Oh, I know the date anyway. I won’t look back at this. It won’t be very interesting later. Not to me. 

I hid the thing under my bed earlier today. I can’t even write it down to myself, but I’m writing about the fact that I can’t write it down. I suppose I’m tired. That’ll be it. My god I’m tired. Can’t you just let me sleep? Please. I heard Kafka wrote best when he was sleep deprived. I could tell it. His stories are so strange and foggy. I realised before I was told that he had insomnia. Maybe I recognised it. Or maybe that’s self-important of me. To compare my own sleeplessness with the inspiration of an artist. God knows he had more demons than I do. Demons. What a melodramatic word. Oh, I don’t like this. It brings out the worst in me and puts it straight into the page. I use so many common ways of speaking.

I don’t want to think about it. I’m going to take it out from under the bed again. Then I’ll stop writing and go to sleep, like I should be.

Thursday.

(Yesterday was Wednesday)

I want to write about it in detail, and record it here. Just to look at it properly. I think I want to record it as it happened — by time and event, oh, step-by-step, what do you call it — as it occurred, as a witness statement, though it feels detached and I’m not sure I can excuse myself of looking at the thing from such a cold angle. Awful. Awful. 

I didn’t write for long yesterday, I was too exhausted, though I didn’t feel it then. Only this morning when I woke up and couldn’t go back to sleep until tonight. Why is it that the only time I’m unable to sleep is exactly when I want to sleep. My first entry was gibberish. I just looked at it, and it was a small and self conscious thing. And this is retrospective. I didn’t give any introductions. I never understood why one needs to do that to a journal entry — to introduce and inform and date and catalogue. Who for? Is that what they’re supposed to be for? Why I’m writing this I’m not sure. Kafka? I’m no Kafka. My misfortunes are my own doing, and they’re not so much ‘unfortunate’ as stupid. So so stupid. I’ve got to stop hitting myself over the head with the idea of it though. I’ve got to look at it properly. That’s why I’m writing. I’ll do it at night when I’m possessed. Not by ghosts. Silly phrase. By the idea of it. 

I have such awful dreams. When I wake up it feels as though I haven’t slept. And then I come back to sleep, to bed, as though I’m drawn here. Well, I am, I’m always so tired now, and always so troubled with the idea of the mattress and duvets and pillows because I spend so long waiting here, for sleep, and it doesn’t take me. My bones ache. They have a mad wavering fizz in them. My muscles are like weights. I could never lift anything with them. They tug my body down. Like I’m sinking to the depths of a dark cold sea. I’ll be lying on the bottom when I sleep, and when I wake up, there’s the rest of the world. There’s my window, there’s natural light, there’s the street, and the sun, and houses and trees, and it’s all just beyond the surface line of the water, and waves distort it and put it out on the wind to drift. Let me sleep. Just let me go to sleep and I’ll make more sense tomorrow. If I slept I wouldn’t be fretting. My mum used to say that to me.

Damn this journal. It’s not a bad idea, but it’s just stopping me trying to sleep.

Saturday.

I did look at it. I said I would in here, and I did do it, but I forgot to write about it. My problem is that my mind wanders about. Like a disobedient dog. Actually quite like Cracker. Though she’s a cat. Here I go again.

New paragraph. Say what you mean. I took out the envelope the night before last — the second time — and I sort of stared at it for a while. It’s very plain. Nothing unusual to see on it, except the postal address. It’s not my address. Not my current address. It’s the address from somewhere else, that I used to stay, to live, though I wasn’t ‘living there’ so much as ‘being alive there’. That’s good enough, I think, I was alright. I’m not being plain. The envelope is from home. 

I dreamed last night that I was watching my mother turn me out again. She caught me at the top of the stairs in the exact middle of the night. I was in her house, so I was younger, teenaged. I felt lighter than I do now. My hands felt lighter on the bottle of vodka. There wasn’t any restraint or conflict or responsibility to weigh them down. I was young. Pretty. Healthy — by necessity, because I was young and pretty. I felt that in the dream. Some part of me hurt to feel it.

I licked the top of the bottle, the round curving cold edge and tasted nothing but glass on my tongue round it. The banisters held me in a cell of shadows cast by the moonlight. I was reckless. When I licked the bottle top my mother was behind me. She was going downstairs to get milk to help her sleep. I took a swig back harshly when she passed me on the stairs like I wasn’t there. My stomach burned. Then I felt happy. She came back up the stairs one by one by one. I looked at her and she looked at me, and then she grabbed me by the big old yellow shirt I used as pyjamas with a hand that smelled of old milk at my nose, and I went limp, and I bumped down the steps, and she vanished and I carried on bumping down the steps, and then I was being pushed out of the back door. She actually pushed me out of the front door, but I dreamed it as the back door of my house that I live in now. My face went through the gap and my shoulders squeezed through with the vodka bottle and then I was very cold and I saw that it was winter. 

I woke up and the bedclothes were on the floor, so I suppose that’s why the snow came into it. 

I’m going to make myself something to eat. Hang on.

Sod it, I’m actually tired now, so I’m going to finish this off. More about the envelope tomorrow.

Monday

Well, I promised.

I had another dream last night. It wasn’t so disturbing, but it was similar which is why I remembered it.

I burned the envelope. It made me sad. My parents don’t live in my old home anymore though so there’s no point keeping the thing under my bed like a magical totem. I wanted to reach into the grate. Try again. I thought I might see a vision in the flames. I didn’t. Obviously. I’d licked the seal, so my blueprint is on there. Maybe it’s different now, a vanished woman’s DNA in somebody else’s more self-restrained hands. All burned up. Well, I had to get it over with. I was being stupid about it. I’m sleeping better. It’s done something. Witchcraft. Very dull, very weak witchcraft, but there’s not much that’s going to do it better for me. I’ll carry on jotting things down before bed, I quite enjoy it, though hopefully it doesn’t serve a purpose anymore.