This false ghost

When sleep has avoided you for the better part of six days, time and space conspire to play naughty tricks on your feeble brain. All night I keep trying to prove to myself that I'm not dead. Looking for signs that I survived the storm and I'm not lodged in some dank corner of hell.

On my parents floor, sweating constantly and rolling in slow angry circles, I think I am in a coffin. I don't believe the night is real. I don't think I should be so hot. So tired. So uncomfortable. The fan spews nothing but hot air. I feel my pulse throbbing in my neck. I can't breathe in this coffin. The air is dying, too. There isn't enough oxygen and it weighs on my chest like a drowned corpse. The room is stifling. It thrums with the constant moan of a gas-powered generator. The dry whispers of the lazy fan. I'm either dead or dying and they've already buried me. I can't find a way out, until I sit up and squint at my hands, wipe off my face and try to re-arrange my pillows for the thousandth time. Alive or dead, I suffer and repented and try to crawl out of the coffin all night.

Every two hours I snap out of the waking nightmare, roused by the abrupt silence of the house, and limp outside to fill the engine. Sometimes I hear my father snoring in the other room. Unshaken by the heat and anger. I'm jealous of his slumber. Angered that I can't find the same genuine bliss.

So I curl up under a sweat-soaked bed sheet and lapse back into the delirium. Drift back into the howling coffin of insomnia. My eyes are closed but I can feel the room pressing down on me. The hard floor lurching against my spine. The carpet wet with perspiration. I welcome the dawn and the new burden of recovery. At least it will be real. Unlike this false ghost of sleep that taunts me with each heartbeat.