sleep

Sleep is strange.

I say so because there is so much potential during the time of sleep--as an alternative to laying down, closing eyes, and doing nothing.

I could eat a meal while watching a movie, a warm supper perhaps.

I could call a friend. Talk for hours and hours for no reason.

I could do something productive, like learning. Or even just to get those assignments out of the way.

I could lie on my stomach and read books. Books make me forget about my own life. I could tuck myself under those pages and worlds, a creation of others I admire, and forget about my own for a while.

Yet, whenever I have the spare time, I choose to sleep.

I crawl into the bed and tuck myself under the bedding. I close my eyes, thinking of the past and imaging of a future which I'm unsure will arrive.

At night, everything is meaningless. Whatever I do blends together with the darkness that gulps up my house, the neighborhood, and a half of the world. So I just choose to blend into a state of unconsciousness.

A few hours later, sunlight strikes my face. Another day has arrived, and I don't know if I'd done anything meaningful as of yesterday.

I strangely appreciate that.

Sleep at night is delightful, but what I like even better is sleep during the day.

To me, napping is the measure of wealth (it sounds strange, but there is no better way to put it).

I can't buy nap with money. It's the privilege of someone who is rich of time and mind, who is relaxed enough to give up on all the dough of the clock just to do absolutely nothing.

The fulfillment of the heart is when I wake up seeing the hour hand with a widened angle, and the cold room filled with the yellowy orange flesh of the sun telling the past of time.

The three hundred thousand years, a span of time in which humans existed, had changed a lot. Technology has improved lives greatly, and humans became more smarter, intelligent, and productive than ever.

Time, which was measured by the angle of the sun and moon in the past, is now measured by numbers--one increase of a count indicating the flow of one second, minute, and hour.

Papers are now replaced with screens. A walk to the bank is replaced by light swipe on the phone. Fans don't have to wait for their favorite music to be printed out as a vinyl, they can simply access it anywhere and anytime on their earbuds.

Everyone fills their days with all kinds of events--ranging from work, self improvement, to socialization. Loose promises become tightened with a ruler of measurement.

"You must arrive to school when the bell rings!"

"You must get on the bus as the station tells you so!"

"You must turn in the report by noon!"

As people run, drive, and type in accordance with the speed of the world, they seem happy, yet less happy at the same time.

One thing that hasn't changed, and I dare to say will not change in the future, is sleep.

No matter the social, cultural, economic background of a person, they must sleep. No matter how automated, organized, and artificial life becomes, the single part of life that cannot be automated or replaced by an alternative source of intelligence, is sleep.

Maybe it's because no matter how many screens we surround ourselves with, how many chips we inject inside our bodies, we are animals after all. You need equally as much sleep as your dog. (scientifically a little less)

And how it breaks my heart to see beloved faces with dark shadows casted beneath their eyes.

I tell them,

"You should get more sleep."

They reply,

"I should."

We exchange awkward smiles, as if everything will resolve from now on.

Yet there is a bitter taste in the air between us,

Perhaps because I know that they won't sleep, and they know that too.

Insomnia plagues the twenty-first century, making innocent people murderers of their own sleep, like Macbeth who "hath murder'd sleep" ten centuries earlier.

Many suffer, since it seems as if securing a good life requires one to be seized of the opportunity to secure their sole source of tranquility.

Our hands are bloody, and our eyes too, since we are the criminals to our own health and peace.

(I say 'our' because my sleep pattern too has been strange lately.

I would sleep twelve hours one day, and three on another.)

So I ask you across the window,

"You should get more sleep."

You say,

"I will."

Only then I can sleep well again,

Because before you I see a vague reflection of myself on the glass

saying,

"I will."

Maybe then, we will be conscious enough to deny sleep as a waste of time,

And rather, accept as a gift of being alive.

Maybe then, sleep won't be strange or foreign to us.

We'd see less potential in the time that spans darkness,

And more potential--a lot more potential--in sleep itself.