after all, i'm only sleeping

Sometimes, I ignore the words and focus instead on the spaces in between them. I close my ears to the messages being spoken by the page and lose myself in the white emptiness of the margins. I drown in the nothingness until it is all there is.

Sometimes, I only listen to the silences in your stories. I let the words slip through my head without gaining purchase and hold on to the breaths you take with both hands. Sentences fall from your lips unheeded as I wait impatiently for every pause.

Sometimes, I look at the patches of blue between the clouds everyone else is making pictures out of. If I open my eyes wide enough, the tears that pool in them help to block out the white. There are no bears dancing across the sky merging into cats and turning into umbrellas. There is only uninterrupted blue that does nothing but simply exist.

Sometimes, I watch the sky instead of the stars. I only see the vast blackness between each sparkling pinprick of light. If I stare into the black long enough, I can shrink myself down to nonexistence, and lose my identity on the breeze sweeping by.

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and sometimes i write stuff when i'm sleeping. i woke up this morning to find this scrawled across the back of the midterm i have near my bed so i can review it for my final at every chance i get (it's been turned over and ignored for the past week and will probably stay that way until monday morning). i actually don't think i wrote this in my sleep (though i would love to say that i could sleep-write. that would be cool) because i vaguely remember waking up a couple of times last night. i must have scribbled this out one of those fits of sleeplessness.

*I'm Only Sleeping - The Beatles