𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐃𝐄𝐀𝐓𝐇 𝐃𝐑𝐈𝐕𝐄 | dazai osamu *EDITING

sleep

edited: ✓ | 5/20/2020

trigger warnings: PTSD, war, (children) casualty

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People didn't seem to realise how sleep was a privilege. To close your eyes and breathe out in an even tandem, to let your mind drift into a false world of fantastical dreams where the flowers stopped rotting and the corpses ceased to decompose; thereby, a dream where you pull bodies out of the water and dress them in dry clothes: Your jeans, your black jacket, your shirt, your hat; thereby, a dream where they were still alive, more than just a perfect hallucination conjured from your starving appetite for longing. Memories? Memories interwoven with dreams always resulted in bloodshed; always resulted in their bodies floating in the water, floating away, away, away from your outstretched hand. Oh...oh...you could still see the mangled tiny limbs, the wrung torsos, the piles of wrinkled clothing, the helplessness that you felt just remembering how they were sprawled over each other, as though the war was just a massive sleepover under the wine-red sky.

The clouds would rain blood for them. Sweep them away with colossal, engulfing waves into loving arms. Fat drops of rain pattered on the windowsill. But you shrug your headphones off—there is no rain.

There are no grievances for the dead. Just a number, just condolences. Their names—no, their collective names sounded wrong as the politician sounds it out. A smarting tinge of disgust as though he could taste the slums on his tongue, a flash of red, a shrivelled singe of contempt.

The clock ticks away. An alarm clock. You close your eyes and you can see the ephemeral neon outlines of the time on your eyelids.

How do people do it?

You close your eyes and all you can see is death. Vicious pogroms, violent outbursts, draconian levels of outrage, twisting and screaming into a monolithic wall of a white-speckled tsunami, pulsating, humming—through the murky translucence you can see entrails, detached arms, slit heads, strings of skin and flesh, blooms and curls of blood unfurling in the water.

Your own personal hell. Satan incarnate.

It crushes you.

"Just close your eyes and sleep," They would say. "It happened, it's the past. My condolences but you can't change what has happened."

Or the more empathetic:

"I'm so sorry that you had to experience that," They would gently smile. Something jarring as to how they were able to smile like that when glossing over war CRIMES. "But you weren't in control of yourself at the time. I can refer you to a counsellor."

You wanted to just take a deep breath and scream. Stare at the cherry blossoms from underneath the water. Immediately recognize that the water wasn't empty, and you were floating in a pool of blood.

Sleep was a punishment. Whatever malady and ailment that a body endures are cured by sleep; your heart slows down, your blood pressure drops, your breathing slows, and your muscles relax. Your body becomes separate from the mind, as the latter runs rampant. You struggle to live in a body that rejects the horrors of your brain.

That would be the punishment you deserve. Then, maybe you could accompany the children that had perished while seeing you, their siblings, and their parents flashing in the darkness of their head.