There are times when my insomnia doesn’t let me get much sleep, and things kind of starts to bleed into each other. These past couple of days have been one of those times, so around two or three in the morning or so, I gave up tossing and turning in my bed and decided to do something productive. Because of my lack of sleep the past week, I was behind on laundry and it started to get to the critical point, so I grabbed some stuff from the top of the laundry pile and headed outside to the laundomat down the street. Early mornings is one of two things I do love about insomnia. The summer nights are wonderful and only a pair of singing blackbirds broke the peace and the sky was a dark, but nowhere near black, cerulean color with a handful of stars strewn across it.
The other thing I liked was the music. I loaded the machine, turned it on and took a seat when it started humming and singing. The noise this time sounded like flutes to my sleep-deprived mind, a strange but beautiful sound. It was a strange kind of music I rarely heard from recorded songs, though sometimes there were rare pieces that caught it, making me think that there were musicians out there capable of capturing the otherworldliness of this delirious state of betweens. Like the background choir from the Princess Mononoke main theme, or Lux Aetherna from the Space Oddysey. Not quite songs, but quite magical in its own right. It was just my brain translating white noise into a tune that sounded like it had a melody hidden in there somewhere, in the spaces between its notes. I listened to it and stared into the washing machine. The sound of the singing blackbirds drifted in through the door I left open. There was no one there but me, no machine running but mine.
I noticed that something was strange when the blackbirds suddenly went silent, and the beautiful ”flute” music turned dark and eerie, like the lower notes on a pipe organ. That happened sometimes, and the sudden horror movie soundtrack playing in my exclusive reality didn’t particularly bother me. But perhaps it made me a little uneasy, because I turned around. In the open door, at the treshold, were two blackbirds, silent and staring. Judging? Definitely Seeing. The three of us stood still for a while, and they never looked away, staring at me in a way that birds never stares at people.
Then, it was as if I looked through the eyes of one of them, and I was looking up at the human that was myself. I felt the little heart of the bird beat, faster than mine, felt the cold floor under its claws. ”I” kept staring at me, the horror movie soundtrack turning increasingly eerie. My face distorted, melting away like dripping mud, revealing black bone underneath skin and flesh. I was rather calm, as I had long since passed the point where it wouldn’t be that odd if I hallucinated. Then, both birds took flight, flying into my chest, and inside was a field, long swaying grass surrounded by forest. Mist laid upon it, and the other bird and I flew between branches until I saw myself again. I was sitting on a throne of bones, surrounded by decaying birds cawing a cacophony of noise, of music-in-noise, drowning everything else out. Hundreds of birds. Thousands of birds. Crows and ravens, from what I could tell, fighting over the black sludge that melted off my own bones. The ”me” sitting on the throne of bones didn’t want to let them have it. After all, it was mine.
We sang, the two of us, me and the other blackbird. A shrill, light and pale song, that sounded almost like the promise of sun when it approaches the horizon in the mornings, like the sound of light dancing in shards of glass, in morning dew. All the other birds stilled, and the ”other me” fell asleep, the skull falling to the ground with a silent ”thud”. The me in front of me lost the fight against the corvids, who quietly, peacefully, took the chance to clean off the disgusting rotted meat and sludge off those bones of mine. Then the soil rose up, as gentle as a sighing wave, and devoured those bones, throne and all, as if only a hill had been there the entire time. The corvids took off, wings whispering, and the blackbirds sat silent. Then the two of us took flight as well, and I landed on my own window sill.
I don’t know how I got home that night, but I woke up in my bed the next morning, feeling... not entirely rested, but much better off than I had been in weeks, months. My laundry was done and neatly folded on my desk, and the window was open. There were footprints of birds on my window sill.
I shrugged. That might’ve been kind of crazy, but there’s this thing about living on the edge of your sanity because of sleep loss for a few weeks that makes even this kind of thing seem... kind of normal. Or at least not that odd. I decided to buy a bird feeder.