I used to have insomnia. The roar of the jets made me restless. But I can sleep now.

The bed I plundered is good food for the fungi. I know they’re running out of dead things, and the living ought to help each other. Atop this mattress I can feel them reaching. Wanting to fuse with me, begging to eat all my rotten parts. I tell them it’s no good, my brain’s already gone. Gone still means something, the fungi know this. When I have one of my remembering dreams, they scratch and tickle like old friends. 

I have other friends too, the ones I found when I first came to this room. Bones and bits of teeth and flesh. All that they are is what they were. Once real. As real as the satellites and the oil lakes.

Engines scream to prove they’re real. Real things die. The smell of death hits my nose now. Rancid and earthy. But that doesn’t make the night less beautiful. Tonight, under the laser moons, the sky is shining.  Shining under its polluted veil. 

Tweeeet, tweet biiip beeeep bip. The drone doves rest their wings upon the telephone poles. Chirping and singing in binary. I know what they’re saying. 

I ought to sleep. Too much time staring out this window is making me remember. I did that too much once. That’s when the insomnia came, when I was thinking and fighting and trying not to be real. Because real things get trampled and caught in shock blasts. Back then I ran, from the dark and the fluorescent lights and my real bed. 

I’ve run enough, enough to fall and stay down.

I force my eyes on the wind trampling the grass. A deep washhh and swooosh. Almost like the jet engines far overhead. 

I curl inwards onto myself, resembling one of my fossil friends. Muscles locked into place, bracing for impact. I’m glad, glad that an impact might come. 

Now, all the little night machines are buzzing. The gears croaking like frogs. If you listen closely, it sounds like the old nights. Back when the memories were bearable. Like booming in the distance. Still there. Still booooom. My hollow head makes everything echo closer. The gentle sound of an explosion. A siren singing of evacuation.

I let my eyelids fall, gently. As gently as the bombs fall from old planes.