Tonight

https://onedailyprompt.wordpress.com/2019/09/27/your-daily-word-prompt-tonight-september-27-2019/

Tonight I will sleep. The nightmares won’t come, the fear won’t wake me. Maybe if I say it often enough it will be true. I don’t remember the last time that I slept, truly restfully slept. I wake up between three a.m. and four a.m. every single night. Usually dreams are the reason.

Once awake I lie there, listening to him breathe beside me. Hearing the shuffle of the dog in the corner. The crickets that sound like trumpets blaring outside my window. My mind races through so many things, real and imagined that are going on in the world…in my life.

I replay the funeral over and over. I doubt the people I love and trust most, hideous toxic thoughts and ideas about them plague my mind. I worry about their mortality, never my own.

I lie in fear, often I cry.

I hope and I pray that tonight will be different. So I repeat it to myself over and over while the sun is above my head and the world makes sense. Tonight I will sleep. The nightmares won’t come, the fear won’t wake me.

Sadly, I know better.