I’m sitting next to you, but I just popped a klonopin. You don’t want me to, and yet I do it anyway.

Am I self-destructive? Do I defy you? Or do I simply want to sleep tonight?

We’re watching Harry Potter 6. I need some cheering up and how better to send me off to what I hope will be a sound sleep?

Thirty-three minutes remain in the movie; the perfect timing before the chemicals kick in and flood my system, allotting for the bottle of pinot that accompanies them. Thirty-three minutes before I drift off to a dateless, timeless sleep.

How lovely. How elusive.

Sleep: such an escape, but oh how it evades me. A chronic insomniac, I’ve been not sleeping since I was two years old. Three a.m., it turns out,  is my witching hour…still is. Every night like clock-work, I greet the hour with a lucid mind and ready eye.

We’re nearing the movie’s end and my head swims with these last moments of narrative. Dumbledore caught in the breeze of the Spring evening on the Astronomy Tower. “Severus…please.”

Such duplicity.

I wonder now, sitting next to you, if you find my taking this klonopin as duplicitous. Or, if you see it as the coping mechanism that it is.

I crave the escape of hours spent seemingly unaware of what is, the escape from being present in my own mind, if only for a time.