It's 2 Am and I am Still Awake

I made a conscious decision (yesterday) at 2300hrs to go to sleep. But I had a journal to write, a phone call to make and a couple of texts to reply which turned to several. An hour later and I was done with everything, so I could finally sleep, except that I couldn't. I didn't know that I would ever say this, but I wished that I had an exam tomorrow (today) because my mind was so alert I could understand astrophysics if I tried to. Nevertheless, I closed my eyes and tried  to sleep.

It's now two hours later and I have given up on sleep, you can only pretend for so long. I decided to wake up and read. But my mind has refused. So I am far too tired of counting sheep, but not tired enough to fall asleep. When everything fails, what does an insomniac do at 2 am?

I try to think about Kenya, and how maybe, just maybe I could come up with a solution to bad governance and corruption. I fail miserably. I tell myself that maybe that's too big a thought for 2 in the morning. So I decide that maybe thinking about my dreams- my dream job, house, partner and a dog ( I am not a dog person). But that's the picture of a perfect family and I force my mind to conjure up that image. But that is also an exercise in futility. Because no insomniac thinks about bad governance or hopes and dreams at 2 in the freaking morning.

All we do is think about the past. The mistakes that we made that are still haunting us. Hindsight is at its best, and we see that the worst mistakes we ever did were out of love. In retrospect, we analyze what we should have done differently, what we could have said or not said. We regret not doing certain things. We entertain thoughts that we've always kept in the dark recesses of our minds, those thoughts that we dare not tell anyone, yet they are the ones that make us truly happy. We relieve the happiest moments of our lives and wish we could have them back.

At 2 am, we think about our past romantic relationships. The texts that we didn't reply. The phone calls that we didn't make. The lies that we told. The secrets that we shared. We think about the wrong people that we fell for. We regret not having walked away sooner. We also remember the good souls that we hurt with our words, the time that we didn't give them yet they loved us to death.

At 2 am, we think about ourselves, we feel guilty, we laugh at our mistakes and sometimes we cry ourselves to sleep.

The title of this post is from the song Breathe (2 AM) by Anna Nalick.