Insomnia in Three Parts

By blue huseyin

Insomnia Pt1.//

It’s 4am. Everything has the vague quality of being just out of grasp, particularly sleep. Being awake feels like an intrusion on the night. I do not belong in this place. I should not know its colours, its sounds, its soft pressure on my chest. I’m casting thoughts out into the dark. Little paper boats meticulously crafted, folded, placed on the water’s edge and pushed out on a whisper. There are so many ways to say that I have nothing to say.

Insomnia Pt 2.//

Sometimes I turn to smoke. Like you could pass your hand right through me, blur my edges, drain my colours away. I leave my body for a while and drift somewhere quiet and dimly lit, and every voice reaches me as though through water. There are days when I think I will not come back. There are days I do not want to come back.

I am turning into a forgotten monument in honour of myself.

But then the beauty mark on your shoulder becomes the axis around which the entire universe revolves. Day and night have become meaningless. The only time I feel awake is when I measure how many heartbeats we spend together, how many ‘I love you’s’ I can fit between ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’.

Insomnia Pt 3.//

My mind often returns to you: 

summons the curves of your face out of the faint paint strokes on the ceiling, your pencil sketch out of the bare trees. I wonder when it was that you made a home in my ribs, curled around my heart like a child and harmonized with its pulse. I was not prepared for the companion that love had made of terror. I have breathed you in, like smoke.  

About the Author

Blue began her writing career at 3 years old when her mother found a love letter in her sock drawer that she had written to a Disney prince. 19 years later at university she came out as a lesbian after discovering the poetry of Carol Ann Duffy, Amy Lowell and Sappho and used their work to influence her own poems. She has been running her professional poetry blog for 2 years now. Her work largely deals with her identity as a gay woman, being the child of immigrants, and her internal monologue, trying to find ‘the intimate self’ within the external world to combat feelings of isolation. Now living in London with her girlfriend Tan and 2 cats Meeko and Bandit, she works in the West End and as a freelance journalist and poet. She is about to release her second poetry collection entitled ‘31’. 

When she isn’t working, she can be found snooping around the Disney Store, bothering her cats, riding around London on the back of her girlfriend’s motorbike or hunched over a book wearing the most extravagant earrings you’ve ever seen! 

Follow Blue:
Personal Instagram: @Blueniverse
Poetry Instagram: @PoemsByBlue
Twitter: @Blueniverse