Trust Rest

Under cover of darkness much can be done. Teeth can regrow. Hair and nails lengthen. Digestion maneuvers nutrients according to caloric requirements. Experience can shift memories into place like hard drives defragmenting. More accurately, overlapping fragments shifting to occupy the same time, the same space. A multiverse of thoughts defying popularized scientific theory within our most intimate lipids. We lie, subsumed by restfulness, uncanny rituals beyond reckoning outsmarting the conscious smarts we value so highly.

I think about these matters often when I am unable to sleep. I feel a whole timezone of in-out in-out breaths occurring and, wallflowerish, am prohibited from joining. Sometimes I stand in front of a mirror and stare at my body utterly without the ability to experience recognition. Peer myopically, back away from condensation on the glass, count pores and stare at hairs. I think about all that I’m not doing when I’m doing all that I do when I don’t rest. I anxiously reiterate to myself the processes that needs must go on during sleep, as though this puny logic can trigger the right sort of fatigue and with the right words softness can envelop me, smooth over the details like that mirror-fog, and go forth to make my insides work properly again.

Send those nighttime street-cleaners to rinse and scrub. Send those crepuscular carrion-birds to tear away what should disappear. Send the ships into port, let them idle and rock, cargo-laden and trusting.