I toss and turn beneath my covers, the blankets coiling around my body as I lay restlessly, hoping that at some point, my rustling and moving will tire me out and allow me to find solace within Sandman's gentle hold, unfortunately and all too commonly, I find no such tire and instead I'm met with the flashing lights of my alarm clock. The time reads 3:07 am, and every new shine of the light covers my room in sanguine bonds of another night spent awake.
The minimal amount of comfort I can find from staying within the covers and sheets of my bed keeps its hold on me, and I find myself staring, staring off into the middle distance, staring at the clock, watching seconds tick by, feeling the world spin by as I begin to lose track of what is and what isn't. The ruby red shine of the artificial light entrancing my sleep deprived mind. Seconds turn to minutes, minuscule grains of sand falling down the hour glass, and every moment reminds me of the slow crawl of night shifts spent working, watching, guarding monsters built to entertain a new generation of children.
When the time reads 3:12 am, I make myself rise from my bed, the muscles in my arms and legs sore and my heart still rendered and raw from yesterday's session with Dr. Andrews. Slowly, painfully, I drag myself to the lone window within my bedroom, every step feeling like lead weights drop down onto my uncarpeted hardwood flooring, and I simply stand there. The view sprawls out before me, the bright purples, reds, and blues of the active night life filling my vision with sights and sounds of excess and sin. The falling rain pitter-patters against the pane of glass before me, sounding like small choirs of angels singing down their hymns from the blackened clouds above.
Eventually, my eyes grow tired and strained from staring out at the nightlife of my city, so I drag myself back to bed. In the place of attempting to find the non-committal peace and death of sleep, I instead decide to get dressed, pulling on the same worn out black leather boots and black dress pants I've been wearing for years, from college, to my time as a night guard, and they continue to serve me even now. A fragment of my past I've never been able to let go of, despite everything that has transpired in my life, everything I've survived, and everything that's yet to happen.
I turn to rummage through my closet for some protective layer against the rain when the world around me starts to spin, my legs growing unsteady and the air thick, as though I've suddenly been caught in the middle of a storm while sailing upon the white foamy waves of the ocean's surface. I fall heavy onto my knees, the rotation of my surroundings only growing faster as my vision twists.
I feel my stomach churn, bubbling and gurgling like a boiling cauldron as the chops of my cheeks fill with saliva. My breath turns rancid and rotten on my tongue and my body throbs with a force from my core than I didn't even know it could produce, and the heavy, acidic, burning weight from my stomach forces itself upwards, the sickly burn of stomach acid clinging to my esophagus, and ending up as a chunky, watery, sickly pile of last nights dinner on my floor.
I fall onto the floor, my body no longer strong enough to support its own weight, and I miss the puddle and chunks of the upturned contents of my stomach by mere inches. I simply lay there until the pain in my body dulls to an ache instead of an active, searing pain, and the world eventually stops, no longer spinning and twisting, my mind no longer in a whirlwind of activity and over-stimulation.
I allow myself a few more moments of the brief respite before forcing myself to my feet, my legs still unsteady, still feeling like lead weights, and nowhere near truly ready to support my weight once more, but I make myself stand anyway. I brace myself against the wall and gather both my breath and my surroundings and what I see before me I almost can't believe. The space that should have been my bedroom, in my apartment in the middle of downtown Los Angeles isn't what I see and in its place is the smell of stale pizza lingering in the air, a lone desk chair sat in the middle of a sparse office, save for two doors twice my size lining either side of the desolate room and a simple console in the middle of the desk that sits against a wall and the endless hum of the lone bulb light hanging above and the constant whirring of the fan that's sat beside the console.
I have to simply stand there and take in, what should have been, the impossible surroundings as I find myself returned to the portal to the more vile pit of hell, known more publicly as Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria, back to where everything began, and where I had hoped it had ended years ago.