Hello there =)
This is a fragment of a story I'm writing... Usually I would finish it, but I've never written anything like this before, so I just want some feedback so that I know whether or not my project is worthwhile.
The story is about a girl who visits the sun during her dreams, to discuss the coming of the next day, to find that he is extremely lonely. It sounds very, very lame, but I am trying!
My eyes are closed, and I am so tired.
So many nights I can't sleep. Insomnia is a mother tiring of breastfeeding a child. Insomnia is the state of such a maddening concentration on sleep that what is sleep and can you please tell me in how many seconds it will arrive?
Insomnia is paving a road of sleep: I will try not to think, so that I can sleep; then I am waiting underneath the veil of not-thought, counting the moments of emptiness, so I can't sleep; then perhaps I will think myself to sleep, and exhaust my mind. It is a din. And it is feeling the thoughts rattling out of your head, spilling over the empty sheets – going out around you as cloth deserts – and around the room, and rebounding back from solid walls of shifting darkness; car screeches squirming over the walls, breathing pulling dark splotches off the ceiling in a pulse, pulse, pulse.
Sleep, sleep – sleep! You are my eyes!
I will not be happy, and I will not be sad – and I rub my eyes and mechanically, sob in the darkness. The night is a moment running from my fingers. With too much noise; too much light; too much of me.
I scramble out of the covers and cannot bear to twist my head around to see the time. I know I will; I know I will. And I know those neon-red numbers sew up everything, and that if I turn around my prickly eyes will unstitch them, and they will fall onto the floor bleeding neon gunk and open up the seething chasms of night. No, I will not look – even though I know I will. I focus on the wall of nothing; I will not look, for the daylight is coming and I will grow frightened. With daylight, comes harsh sunlight, comes life and in it, comes people looking across at you to make sure you're not blemishing those dazzling outpourings of daylight.
Books and pens and little things form haphazard shapes upon the wall, growing into butterfly-cats, or flower-clockwork-eyes.
I cannot look, so I must leave. I leave the room, then the front door, the house, then the street, the next street, and on until I can see conveyor belt of cars stretching from eye-corner to eye-corner. With each skid of car-flesh, my heart jumps. Like a fish in a cage. I could lie down right hear and go to sleep! But I am not here, I am at home – and I am not here, I should not be here.
And then I am watching the lights grow larger and larger until they have seized all the sight in my sweaty eyeballs and I can't see anything anymore.
That was the night I decided to visit the Sun.
I walked to the park, and I climbed to the very last outstretched hand of the tallest tree I could find. Under me, I could see houses settled on a vast basement, sleeping like sediment.
'Excuse me, but this is not quite as high as I would have liked.'
I could feel a little warmth in the tree, a blush – it was a very gracious tree, but a very proud one at that, a relic from a more gentlemanly era – and it seized all of its strength, and pushed for the heavens. I could feel its wooden muscles heaving beneath my feet, and when the houses beneath me had dissolved into masses of dull green – oh! I could see the sea – I tapped upon its trunk.
'Thank you so much. I'm sorry to have inconvenienced you,' I said as I leant from its trunk.
I was sticking into the stars like the tip of a fishing rod, and I was the bait, dangling on its tip. The hungry stars bobbed around me, and I could feel the tree, sensing the danger, retracting its mighty limbs.
I jumped, and was caught in starry hands.
The sun waxed lyrical in front of me.
I wondered what was more practical: to walk or run the journey? Perhaps running is not so tiring out in the stars, because it's not possible to be short of breath.
I walked, so I could watch the planets falling behind me, so I could see from all angles – properly – the space that I might never see again. It's good to file all facets of a memory, for future reference. So that these pieces can be taken out and examined later, and you will understand the answers to the questions that they will ask you, and you will receive a well-earned mark of 100%; then time would not be poured into the anxiety caused by unknown answers.
My legs became tired from my walk, and as I passed Mercury I fluttered into a breaststroke, so I could give my legs a rest. Legs and planets seemed to be two very difficult things to think of at once, and so I didn't think about my legs – they just were. They were an extension of the space I was filling.
The sun grew fatter with each stroke of myself, and each flail of the other part of myself; and déjà vu flooded me, wetting my brain, denying it of oxygen...
