some days, your head just feels like a clusterfuck. a clusterfuck of voices and sounds, not specifically your own, but confined to your head, anyway; car alarms and blaring sirens and barking dogs and train horns and static radio stations that never quite come in when you drive just a bit too far from the city. some days you just wake up feeling like weights have been implated in your chest and at the corners of your eyes and it doesn't make you feel rested, it makes you feel more sleep deprived than night terrors or caffeine jitters or the newborn baby who has a long way to go until she grasps the concept of normative sleeping patterns -- or what we like to call normative sleeping patterns, because who does have a grasp on that, anyway? you wake up at a decent time, but can't drag yourself out of bed until well into the day. most days it's rewarding enough to get up and have a cup of coffee, to wake you up and give you that temporal rush and feeling of invicibility, like you can do anything and you will do anything, but days like this make you feel like not even the largest dosage of caffeine one of those mugs can give you will be enough to save you. hours roll by, but they feel like minutes as you lie there, trying to will yourself to move, and before you know it, it's ten eleven twelve one two three four and nearly the entire day is gone but the rest of the day moves so slowly that you hardly even notice, even with the hovering cloud of anxiety for the time that you've let slip by you and the work you've yet to do. it keeps after you, making it hard to notice, tensing the muscles in your face up, and soon you have a headache and a sore jaw, drooping eyelids and ragged breath, preventing you from work, and soon still comes the crashing of guilt all over you as minutes drag on; if only i had gotten up at the first alarm if only i had started sooner if only i knew better time management if only i had taken a sleep aide last night and soon all the world's problems are yours; i should have made a donation to save the children i shouldn't have turned my sister down when she needed help moving i should have told my dad i love him before he died i shouldn't have gotten drunk at that bar and gone home with that guy i should have been a better person i shouldn't have been born -- and the worst of it is, it isn't just some days, it's so many days, every day. it disabilitates you though you try so hard to ignore it, and you begin to wonder why you bothered to get out of bed at all. you can't just explain it - to your family, your teachers, your boss, your coworkers, the little boy on the bus who feels intimidated because you can't will yourself to return his smile - you can't even explain it to yourself. it feels like a dead end; you've exhausted your options and have nowhere left to turn except back; back into yourself, into seclusion, into mornings and afternoons and evenings and days like this. no one else can see what's so bad about your life that you have to hide - you're not even sure that you can, either. maybe it's just an impulse, a compulsion, something hardwired into your brain. it makes you fear sleep, anyway - fear sleep for the lack of it, for the images that come at night, for the aspect of waking up and repeating the dance all over again. and yet, you do; you sleep and wake up and cycle through it all again.