Finding The Sun

I am always tired. In the summers, I go home to Virginia and enter perpetual coma. Something about the boring, sprawling suburbia, I think. I wake, only to find life just as I left it. I go back to sleep.

Sleep lends itself to

dreams,

sometimes nightmares.

In one nightmare,

I’m in a field

lying down under a

dusty blue sky.

Yellow butterflies crawl

all over my body

and I can’t move

to swat them off.

Their wings bat fiercely,

eclipsing the silence.

The grass grows green and tall

for miles.

Nobody sees me.

Nobody comes to help.

There are nights when

of course I don’t dream.

Hours of slumber feel like seconds,

and I am awake again,

and I can’t find the sun.

I am always tired. Sometimes I am so tired, I can’t sleep at all. In the darkness, there is light. The glow of my cell phone screen, white at 2 am. The moon on its way out of the sky. The street lamps that shimmer orange in the night.

Sometimes I dream

and I can’t wake up

and demons from fairytales

sit in the corner of my room

while I wiggle my fingers and toes

until my body comes to.

And eventually the darkness settles and slips away

but I can’t find the sun.

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Edited by: Rachel Goulston

Cover Photo Credit: Jasmine LeCount-McClanahan