"I didn't sleep two days this week, but slept for 14 hours on two others," I  told my fellow drunks.

"I'm not sure if the insmonia will be gone yet, but I'm hoping tonight I'll be able to sleep."

I walked home in typical winter weather for St. John's, neither too cold or warm, too calm or windy or snowing too hard. Much of the journey was undertaken alone, as my new company had departed at a fork in the road not far from the scene of the good, though strange, times.

I entered the condo and knew I should try my hand at sleeping, but felt uneasy about it and not quite ready. I decided to sift through a night's worth of emails and messages and settle in to play some FIFA 13. The emails and messages were not urgent and soccer dominated my mind for at least an hour.

At sightly after 3 in the morning, I chose to sleep. There is a big difference between intending to sleep, choosing to sleep and acutally sleeping, which I had become all too familiar with. Thankfully, the slight drunk I had was conducive to sleeping and I fell asleep not long after my head hit the pillow.

Suddenly, I was awake again.

Somewhere in the neighbourhood of two hours had passed, and there was nothing happening. The condo was still and silent, but something inside of me felt awful. It wasn't a physical pain or my stomach telling me that I shouldn't have drank, it was the something else.

It's easy to fall back asleep usually, especially when one is sleep-deprived and drunk, but there was no repireve coming from this something else I spoke of.

It sat in my guts. It occasionally pushed its way up to the back of my skull. It sat behind my eyes like a passenger sits shot-gun. There was no escape.

My thoughts turned to the same place they had been turning for months, and I didn't want to be there. I tried to suggest I wouldn't go, that I should turn in early and call it an evening, but the shadow self was not 'aving it. It fought me every inch of the way, to the point where I had to yell in my head. The echoes inside one's head can be so loud, sobering and jarring.

Still, slept never revisited me. I begged for it to haunt me like my memories were, to grab some tender piece of my soul and bring it to the land of dreams. It was hopeless. There was freedom to choose, but sometimes the body did not respond as one requested. There was a constant struggle between one's will and one's body until the day we return to the earth, deathd rive having conquered us.

It was in these nights the death drive was strongest, because sleep was the cousin of death. If I couldn't mingle with sleep, I always spend time with her cousin. There was certainly a desire for her company now, and wasn't sleep just a taste of death anyways?

One stops feeling, mostly, and ceases to exist in reality. Dreams take over, and it sounds like we may dream in death too. There is something comforting and reassuring about sleep, because it feels like a partial return home, a taste of what is to come when we finally kick up our feet and end.