Sleep

Life frightens me. I tiptoe along a rocky precipice overlooking a shadowy depth unplumbed by all but human imagination and it takes my breath away. There is beauty and a sort of magnetism that attracts me to this blackness so total and all encompassing. In this I find comfort, a sanctuary away from the realities that assault my conscious senses. Like a child burying its head under blankets when frightened, I feel a primal comfort in darkness. How dearly I’d like to embrace everything that nothingness offers me! And with that thought, I lose my footing (of fault or of fate?) and plunge into the chasm.
Within its grasp, at last, I can feel the universe showing me a polite mercy as it cleaves the bonds between the very atoms that manifest the corporeal me. Wonderful sensations overwhelm my fingers and toes. They scream with wild delight as I move my thumb up and down each digit until they dissolve like sand in a great wind. Soon it spreads to my arms and legs which I move, curiously at first, and then stop, no longer able to discern whether they still belong to me or return to the possession of the cosmos. My torso surrenders all in an anticlimax and my mind clouds in euphoria.
Then I see them, bright colors spilling into my vision in drops and smears so vibrant it illuminates what was once devoid of color. The sight awes me and my mind begins to wonder marvelous things. Have I finally reached an awakening; a lightness of being of which there is no going back? This is the world I have so lustfully dreamt of. One in which I have transcended material things and bodily possessions for the sight beyond mortality. In the nothing I have found all desire. But then the visions swirl into one another like mixed paints until they recreate my familiar blackness and I realize I am still but a man. The sights I reveled so religiously in were part of a final betrayal by the eyes I had so neglected in life. While the colors danced, the childhood blanket I had run to in fear was pulled over my unknowing head and the only comfort it affords is that I will soon discover just what nothing truly means.