• The days are slowly setting in on me. The hours are drenching my clothes and seeping through my skin. I can’t get away; no matter how hard I try or what I do, sleep still evades me. I’m beginning to think that I have somehow wronged the Sandman, and he refuses to visit me when I lay down after a long day to whisper fantasies into my ear. Fill my head with dreams, my dreams with happiness. Without dreaming the world has turned and left me. Sleep has avoided me for so long; sometimes I can’t tell the differences between my fantasies and the waking world. With Insomnia, you don’t sleep, but you’re never awake. Voices drift, sounds drum on longer then they should, visions are unfocused and hazy. I can’t stand it. I wish for it to end.
    I begged and begged my parents to take me to a doctor a year ago at the end of my sophomore year in high school, and when they finally did the doctor diagnosed me with Insomnia and gave me no medications. All he said was someone my age should get natural sleep. It’s near the end of my junior year now and I haven’t been able to sleep for days. Weeks… months maybe. I don’t know anymore. Each sunset is exactly the same. There’s no difference between any of them and soon they all fade and I pray that sleep will come that night, but it never does. I wish that I could fade just like a sunset.
    After school, I climb onto the smelly, crowded bus with my book bag at hand and an umbrella in the other. Unlike most, I look forward to the rain. It helps me sleep and if I can sleep tonight, that would make my life so much easier.
    “Hey Kaylee!” someone calls out my name. I flip back a lock of hair to see who it is and spot my former best friend, Bailey waving to me at the back seat. The reason why she is my former best friend is not that long of a story, but it is a boring one. Let’s just say people change, and the only way you can not drag your self down that path is to cut the strings that are tied. I wave back and give a sheepish smile, but make no effort to sit by her. Instead I take a seat next to a scrawny boy with headphones on. I can hear the heavy metal music playing through the tiny speakers, but I can’t distinguish the song.
    “Can I sit here?” I ask him. He doesn’t seem to notice and continues to nod his head up and down to the music like a chicken. I sit down anyway.
    I place my bag on my lap, close my eyes and throw my head back against the seat. I try to drown out the noisy voices of fellow students and little children screams and try to listen to the rain pattering heavily on the bus rooftop, but instead the voices and screams turn droning and cause me to cover my ears and wince. The boy next to me seems to notice now and turns to consult me.
    “Hey, are you okay?” he asks, not bothering to take off his headphones or at least turn down the volume so he can hear me answer. So I just smile, nod my head and lip the words, “I’m okay.”
    I arrive at my bus stop without incident to my bitter disappointment. I was kind of hoping for a roll over or at least get a tire stuck in a ditch, but those buses are built tough! Walking home is a drag and it takes every bit of energy I have left to scale up the front steps of my walk way. Thanks to my umbrella, my hair and my clothes are untouched by the rain, except now a storm is setting in and the wind blows droplets in every direction in swirling clouds. I curse the few renegade drops that hit my exposed skin with an alarming sting and coldness.
    I open the front door to my house and like always, my little sister, Kristen runs out to greet me, wrapping her slender arms around my legs as a hug. I tossel her pale blonde hair, the same color as mine and my father’s and kiss her on her forehead.
    “Hey!” she squeaks out.
    “Hey back,” I say.
    “Guess what?” she asks.
    “What?”
    “You have to guess!” she whines and places her hands on her hips for dramatic effect.
    “Ummm…” I wonder, only half interested and walk towards the kitchen and to the refrigerator. “You have a boyfriend?”
    “Gross!” she spits. “No!”
    “No?” I ask in mock horror. “Oh well, if it’s not that, then what is it?” I reach into the fridge and grab Minute Made fruit punch in a soda can.
    “Mom and Daddy are gone,” she says.
    “They are?” I ask in real interest now. “Where are they?”
    Kristen helps herself to a fruit punch too, but I offer her mine. All of a sudden I don’t feel too thirsty.
    “In the hospital,” she answers, swiveling in a bar stool.
    “What are mom and dad doing at the hospital?”
    “Grandma is sick.”
    All is quiet and I stomp out of the kitchen mumbling, “Great, just another thing to add to my list of crap!”

    Later that night, I got a call from my father saying that they were going to be at the hospital till tomorrow afternoon. I hear mom in the background sobbing and yelling.
    “Is mom okay?” I ask.
    Dad coughed his throaty cough that sounded more like gagging then anything else before he answered. “She’ll be fine, just take care of Kristen for us, okay?”
    “Okay dad.”
    “G’night Kaylee.”
    “Good night.”
    I lay in my bed that night, not breathing, unmoving, to see how long I can stand oxygen deprivation. I let out my breath and look towards my window. Its pitch black and the storm’s still continuing outside. It is dead silent except for the pounding rain against the window and the howling wind. Lightning flashes across the sky and lights up my room for a split-second and then dissipates. I thought it could be powerful enough to light up the whole world. Another one strikes, and another; all within a close distance. I would assume with the intensity of the light that the storm was less than ten miles away. I close my eyes and let the sounds of the rain and the wind push me toward sleep, but I am soon awakened again by a crack of thunder. I throw a pillow over my head and try to drown away all the sounds. Just this once, I want it all to go away. Why can’t I have peace? Another crack of thunder laughs at me from just outside my window and sends my heart racing. I wish for sleep. I wish for nothingness.