The night is an endless frustrating vast empty well into which I am continually falling but never reaching the bottom, never drawing closer to the malicious water.

At 2 am, I wake up, my body electric, my eyes watchful and alert and as far away from sleep as is possible.

I peek through the Venetian blinds that drape my window like eyes from a woebegone factory.

Yes, I peek through the blinds, and I see nothingness—the black and implacable and impenetrable and unforgiving night as thick and dark as a swamp.

I return to my bed, which lies alive with sheets wrinkled and puke green and sweaty, and I pound my pillow into smithereens and slam it against the headboard of my bed.

I try to read Kafka’s The Trial. Strange choice to seduce sleep, n’est-ce-pas? But the words on the filthy page are like worms that curl into opaqueness, and Kafka’s paragraphs elongate till they are as impenetrable as the swarthy night.

I blunder my way out of bed and stumble to the kitchen and pour myself a secret bowl of Cheerios and return to my bed and slurp the cereal and study the little O’s as if they held some sort of meaning,

And I hope and pray that the cereal will gird me for the long fight through the night to find rest and meaning in the nothingness of the dark.

The night is a boa constrictor wrapping itself around my soul and squeezing the life out of it.

I’ve had enough of Kafka’s prose, which is a dark impenetrable puzzling of malice and myth-making words of anomie and soullessness.

I turn off the silver metallic lamp by the bed and plunge into the blackest of the night so far.

The pillow feels like a memory that I no longer want to hang on to.

I toss and turn, feeling the sheets beneath me like iron, the pillow like the repository of lost hopes and dreams.

The night screams on, growing more tragic by the minute, by the second, like an evil and rambunctious dragon.

I levitate from the bed. The sheets burble with unforgiving sweat.

I toddle down the hallway to the bathroom and hang my dick like dirty laundry over the toilet bowl, which in the death of night resembles a huge gaping mouth yearning to swallow me whole.

Drip. Drip. Drip. The peeing finally comes to a denouement that is completely devoid of significance. Done. My body is thankfully empty of urine.

Back to the Shakespearean tragedy of the bed. 4 am. 4:30 am. 5 am. The minutes click by like sodden and lugubrious steps that one takes in some netherworld where sleep is not delineated, defined, or allowed.

Facing one way. Rolling over. Facing another way. My eyes as far from sleep as New York is from Capetown, as Pluto is from Earth.

Eyes alert, wired, steady, peering into the darkness and the future that lurks in that darkness,

And seeing nothingness. Peering. Staring. Unblinking. I lie strangling on the well-sweated sheets, the perspiring sheets,

And wait for a haunted sleep that promises never to come.

Christopher Johnson is a writer based in the Chicago area. He has done a lot of different stuff in his life. He’s been a merchant seaman, a high school English teacher, a corporate communications writer, a textbook editor, an educational consultant, and a free-lance writer. He’s published short stories, articles, and essays in The Progressive, Snowy Egret, Earth Island Journal, Chicago Wilderness, American Forests, Chicago Life, Across the Margin, Adelaide Literary Magazine, Blue Lake Review, The Literary Yard, Scarlet Leaf Review, Spillwords Press, Fiction on the Web, Sweet Tree Review, and other journals and magazines.

You can find more of Christopher’s work here on Ink Pantry.