Page 34 - HEF Pen & Ink 2020

THE SLEEP I LOST
by Marrin Chapman
As a teenager who takes four college level classes, is involved in numerous clubs, two bible studies, Wednesday night youth group, a church leadership group, has a job, has soccer year round, and takes piano lessons, I never expected to get a lot of sleep. I expected to lose it. Going to bed at eleven p.m. is early, and getting up six hours later is restful. Sometimes, I close my eyes in the middle of a boring chemistry lecture for a second just to taste the melanin and black air. I sit in my car on the way back from practice dreaming of the sleep that awaits me after hours of studying; but, when I get home, I can’t. The lamp beside my bed is lit. The speaker on my desk hums the soft sound of Coldplay. The cup on my windowsill still steeps with hot mint tea and honey. I cannot sleep.
I lose sleep over what I can control. I lose sleep and the biology homework that slipped my fa- tigue-fogged mind. I lose sleep and the bible I’m supposed to use at seven the next morning. I lose sleep and track of every task I take on, but the fear of a two-hour test on all 206 human bones is not what keeps my weary eyes fixed on fairy lights that keep dark walls dimly lit. I lose sleep over tomorrow. I lose sleep over the anxiety that encompasses my eyes, that makes me see through a lens of calamity and doubt. I lose sleep over every misstep: the laugh I made, the words I stuttered, the actions I made. I lose sleep when my heart falls in my chest, violently tearing my mind out of a night terror yet again. My heart beats, thrums, echoes so loudly in the concavity of my chest that all I can hear is just that. I lose sleep tossing and turning and thinking and just sitting there, still. I sit there in the deafening sound of silence trying to trick my mind into sleep, so that I wake up rested, so that I wake up okay. The sleep I lose is as numerous as the stars in the night sky, which I know because I too am awake when they are.
When my alarm rings in the morning, I cannot open my eyes because it feels as though my eyelids have been tied down with cinder blocks and the weight of my homework. My limbs ache with the fatigue that my eyes feel in the middle of a calculus lecture. The temptation to sleep is all too great, and the need is even greater. My mouth and mind move slowly to speak the words that I need to say. The senseless stutter, the miscalculated laugh, the clumsy fall, all hang over my head, reminding me of what I failed to do. I go home, repeat the same tedious cycle, and come to one conclusion: I lost sleep and my mind.
UNTITLED
by Lydia Fife
UNTITLED
by Lily Templeton
Derry could never match the leisure and ten- derness of Killeagh, which was quietly settled among the soft, northern hills of Ireland. Early on, he real- ized that he was too heavy for the village he was born to. Sometimes, he would watch his mother breathe, watch her lungs fill with weightless air that seemed
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to lift her off her feet with every breath, and he would breathe with her but felt the air instead as cold lead that filled his stomach and pushed his heels deeper into the ground.
He noticed the way that everyone else was able to float seamlessly over the earth, unnoticed, while his heels dug deep grooves wherever he went. It seemed like every move he made was recorded and every impression created by his great figure was a glaring reminder of just how much space he took up.
The deep-rooted aggression he was born with snaked around his body in place of the vessels that were supposed grow there, and the whole village saw him, saw the internal fuse, and they were afraid. Oth- er children ran from him, sometimes in making fun of but others in genuine fear. Even teachers flinched at his presence, and probably for good reason, as Der- ry tended to wear a sadistic smile on his face even at the most intimate moments.
However, the most peculiar thing about the boy was his eyes, which were set heavy into his face and did most of the talking for him. They were deeply unsettling in that they posed a threat to anyone caught off guard, who seemed to fall into them and