Sleep: Death’s Counterfeit

By Snehasree Senthilkumar

My vision blurred, the beckoning call of sleep hanging upon my eyelids like a

dead weight. I struggled to force my windows to the world awake and alert,

stretching the muscles that pull my eye open until they are taut.

If I keep doing this, maybe they will realize their part in the failure of my body to

save me from the desire of my mind. They say the mind controls the body. But it

is seldom vice-versa. The body is but a puppet for the mind to harness. It pulls

various strings with an iron grip, making the body a slave to its biased

commands. The body struggles under the torments of the world, and endures the

tortures of it’s own master. Maybe for decades. Maybe just seconds. Whatever

sealed time fate deems, the body and mind, must accept.

Choice is a rare thing in death. And there is no choice in whether one is granted a

chance to choose, to continue living in the glory of pain, or perish into ashes,

forgotten amidst a sea of silent corpses. However the story goes, the body’s

perpetual pain blossomed from the losses endured, the battles won, stemmed

from all beginnings and endings. The body, constantly humming with

insecurities and uncertainties; it’s worries and anxieties. That body ceases to

fight at a time it has no control over, and even the fractured mind which pieces

together the limp body, giving it purpose and direction, becomes dark and lost at

a fated time. The eyes shutter down and refuse to allow the warmth of the sun, or

vibrant hues of the world pervade its space. It shuts itself in, and with it, all

perception of life around itself, the teeming and bounding life that pleads to be

appreciated. The other senses follow suit, and as the lungs give into their fatigue,

as the last breath slips out of the nostrils. That is when the world ends.

But does it end gently, a candle in the wind? Or does it end violently with

anarchy, like a world on fire? I suppose the answer belongs to the dead, and

remains with them forever.

For, if you ask the dead, “How does it end?”

They will reply, “You will have to wait for the world to end first.”

So for now… Sleep.

By Snehasree Senthilkumar