Wrote this on December 27, 2009. Recently unearthed.

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What is the use of the day and the night? I’ve often wondered about why a sun should need to perturb the sleeper’s eyelids. Perhaps it is among the most despised disturbances in life, waking from a much preferred—or much needed—slumber. Yet waking up also assumes that there is a life you belong to; chores that need to be fulfilled, jobs that need to be worked, people that need to be loved. The same cycle is the concept of life simply going because that is just how it is. I concur with Robert Frost’s draconian opinion about life: “It goes on.”

Conversely, sleep is as much a foe as it is a friend. But who can hate sleep? A patient, perhaps, etherized on a lonely hospital bed with an absent mind and soul; a widowed grandmother alone at home, hiding from old age; or even a youthful boy clinging onto his blanket-shield to evade his fears of a dark bedroom.

I’ve never been a spiritual person. Sometimes, when my story leaks to unctuous others, they talk of incubus and spiritual attacks with perverse conviction. That Satan had been summoning demons to intrude my nightly relapses. I know, in all earnest, that the events that took place were far from the norm. But I can never judge if someone was trying to “tell” me something; a human, a demon, an angel… maybe even my own conscience had something to say.

Yes, who am I to know? A first year college student, at the time, and I had yet to explore the strange world around me. It’s fascinating how after meeting only one person, all the difference had been made in my narrow world. Yet, I was still nauseated from the high school bubble—the social awkwardness and the criticisms for just being. I wanted to be alone, forever. I wanted to believe that life held more meaning—that I had more purpose to breathe the intoxicating fumes of Southern California than to die and have my ashes inhaled by some other living creature.

If anything, the experience only kindles my spirit.