Last night...sleepless panic

Like blood, once it drains away you cna never stuff it back in again to make it live. I lay in the ugly budapest night wondering for long moments what I'm doing here?

Adrift without anchor, floating without plans.
Stuffing the pillow as hard as I can over and onto my head, thinking that by shutting off the silence outside I might quell the roar within.

But it just gets louder, like stormy waves crashing it roars on with monotonous fury. And then the memories start...

...

At first, I let them, thinking happy memories might lull me slowly into sleep, carry me off into dreams of a similarly happy timbre. But instead, even the thought of a purple plastic fiver shoots hot sorrow down my legs.

I can't allow myself to think of anything of the past because it's over and there is much I miss and perhaps even a little I regret. Yet, with eyes determinedly shut, nor can I think of the future at all because it's so uncertain.

So I'm stuck in this none too sure present, frightened.
I feel utterly engulfed by panic.

And so the old (the not so old) thoughts return. Those thoughts of trains and tall buildings and blood.
Thoughts that make me feel like Virginia Woolf filling her pockets.
Thoughts that make me feel heavy though not in a fat way.

And the transition between sleep and armoured awareness is drenched with sweat and fury.
Sweat, and sheet-twisting frustration that makes complete the viciously turned circle of happiness-unhappiness and of compromise that is perhaps not mine to make.