Monologue by Jean-Pierre Martinez
The small hours, are you familiar with them? One, two, three, four… By five, we’d already be free from trouble. Just a bit of patience, with the radio softly playing in the background. But instead, we wake up and peer out the window. Not a glimmer of light. We strain our ears. Not a bird’s song. The diurnal creatures are still asleep, the nocturnal ones are already in bed. No hope of an imminent tomorrow. We are in the deepest darkness, in the land of no man, the night of the wakeful sleepers. Of course, making the effort to rise and move about is an option. But it seems premature. Almost unnatural. To see the night before having seen the daylight… So we must turn back. Cross the border again. Return to where nothing can reach us yet. Where nothing can wait for us. Where no one can hear us. The beyond is on this side of an eternal reversible. I count to a hundred. Backwards. Ninety-nine, ninety-eight… Hoping that before the end of this countdown, I will have stopped counting. On nights of great insomnia, I start at seven billion. Six billion, nine hundred ninety-nine million, nine hundred ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred ninety-nine others before my turn comes in this vast open-air waiting room that is the world of the living. How long to peel away one by one all these existences that are not mine, to recognise myself in this crowd and find my sleep? One night to know who we are. What sets us apart from others. A lifetime to discover everything that is not us. To die. To blend into the indistinct once again. To sleep. To let go. With the fear of waking up as someone else. In a darkness that would be a hopeless nightmare without the prospect of morning. What keeps me alive, what keeps me awake, is the fear of sinking through a bad night into the wrong sleep, eternal fatigue. Insomnia is an unending race against time. A temporary victory. Four, three, two, one… Suspended between the drowsiness of the night and the harshness of awakening, the small hours trickle away the counted time of insomniacs.
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A sketch from the collection Like a fish in the air
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