Watchers of Insomnia- Print

from $50.00
This is what 3 AM looks like when sleep won't come and the anesthesia has worn off but the grief hasn't even begun. I painted this in the weeks after they took my eye. I couldn't close the other one-not really. Every time I tried to rest, I felt them watching. The eyes in the upper corner are the ones I imagine trained on me when I walk down the street, when I'm alone in my apartment, when I'm trying to disappear into myself but can't because I've become visible in a way I never asked for. The buildings tilt because nothing stays level anymore. The ground shifts. I used to navigate the world with depth and now I have to guess. Those figures in the windows aren't specific people, but the blurring between reality and dream when I want to be asleep but can’t. The people floating are people dreaming, going somewhere else, while I’m stuck awake at 3 am. But the deeper truth lives in the edges, where the architecture dissolves into dark woods. I kept dreaming of a creature stalking my left side- the side where my peripheral vision used to be. Before the surgery, I could catch movement in my blind spot without turning my head. Now that protection is gone, and my dreaming mind turned that absence into something sentient. Something that knows I can't see it coming. The creature doesn't need to hide anymore because I've lost the ability to detect it. The waves in the smoke- that's the insomnia. It doesn't look like night. It looks like drowning while everyone else sleeps. The colors are wrong because everything feels wrong. Yellow used to be warm. Now it's the color of streetlights that keep me awake, of eyes that don't blink, of the jaundiced way I see the world since my body became a place of loss.
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This is what 3 AM looks like when sleep won't come and the anesthesia has worn off but the grief hasn't even begun. I painted this in the weeks after they took my eye. I couldn't close the other one-not really. Every time I tried to rest, I felt them watching. The eyes in the upper corner are the ones I imagine trained on me when I walk down the street, when I'm alone in my apartment, when I'm trying to disappear into myself but can't because I've become visible in a way I never asked for. The buildings tilt because nothing stays level anymore. The ground shifts. I used to navigate the world with depth and now I have to guess. Those figures in the windows aren't specific people, but the blurring between reality and dream when I want to be asleep but can’t. The people floating are people dreaming, going somewhere else, while I’m stuck awake at 3 am. But the deeper truth lives in the edges, where the architecture dissolves into dark woods. I kept dreaming of a creature stalking my left side- the side where my peripheral vision used to be. Before the surgery, I could catch movement in my blind spot without turning my head. Now that protection is gone, and my dreaming mind turned that absence into something sentient. Something that knows I can't see it coming. The creature doesn't need to hide anymore because I've lost the ability to detect it. The waves in the smoke- that's the insomnia. It doesn't look like night. It looks like drowning while everyone else sleeps. The colors are wrong because everything feels wrong. Yellow used to be warm. Now it's the color of streetlights that keep me awake, of eyes that don't blink, of the jaundiced way I see the world since my body became a place of loss.