1. This sleepless night, this ache in my head…the price of your beloved's displeasure! 2. My face bears all these spring-marks—witness to how many springs I have lived through without a single brushstroke of color! 3. Close your eyes and feel me, yet when I stand before you, you cannot hold my gaze even once! 4. I have left all the memories of this city scattered across diary pages, tangled in crooked verse. In your leisure, could you set the rhythm right? 5. When I am no longer here, tend to yourself with care. No one belongs to anyone forever, do you understand? 6. You are so wrapped in mystery, the you within you, like another burning desert planted in the heart of a desert! 7. If love comes again and again, where lies the harm, if each time it helps someone become human? 8. The ankle-bell I fastened to the sweet wind—to hear its chiming, you must become restless on the outside like you are, yet still within, as unchanging as I. 9. I do not know why you call love by the name of torment! For me, love has only one meaning: death. 10. By staying so far from your body, I have drifted so close to your soul that now I cannot even tell which way leads back to distance!
# Still, Though Sleepless The mind that finds no rest becomes a vigil unto itself. It watches, waits, and witnesses—not the world without, but the ceaseless churning within. There is a paradox in this: to be still and wakeful at once, as though the body has learned to hold its breath while the soul keeps its eyes open through the dark hours. Sleep is a forgetting. It is the mind's permission to dissolve, to unmake itself for a span of hours, and return newborn to consciousness. But when sleep abandons us, we are left standing at the threshold of ourselves, neither fully asleep nor fully awake, suspended in a clarity that feels almost like grief. The person who cannot sleep discovers something the rested world does not know: that stillness and motion are not opposites but lovers in an embrace. The body may lie motionless, but within it galaxies turn. The heart beats its steady measure. The blood moves through its rivers. Thought spirals endlessly, a wheel that will not stop, will not slow, will not grant reprieve. In this state—still, though sleepless—we become acquainted with a peculiar solitude. The world sleeps around us. The houses are dark. The streets are empty. And we remain, conscious, alert, present to our own presence in a way that day's distractions never permit. It is a terrible gift, this wakefulness. It strips us bare. It shows us ourselves without the mercy of forgetting. Yet there is in this stillness, despite the torment of sleeplessness, something approaching grace. For to be awake while the world dreams is to touch a kind of truth—one that daylight obscures with its busyness, its noise, its relentless demand for motion and purpose. In the dark hours of our wakefulness, we are forced to meet ourselves. And that meeting, however difficult, is real.
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