やみ
かいふく
くうはく
darkness / recovery / the blank space
It was 3:15 AM. The time of night when the city stops pretending to be a machine and finally admits it is an organism.
I was sitting in the kitchen of my apartment. The refrigerator hummed—a low, electric vibration that I felt in my teeth. Across the table sat a woman I had been seeing. She worked in high-frequency trading. She lived her life in microseconds.
She was drinking espresso. At 3:00 AM.
“Imagine,” she said, her eyes fixed on the blue LED of the microwave clock. “If you could take a pill. One pill, once a day. And you never needed to sleep again. No side effects. No fatigue. You just get eight extra hours, every single day.”
She looked at me.
“What would you do with the time, Hideki? You could learn three languages. You could write five novels. You could trade the markets in London and Tokyo simultaneously.”
I spun the ice in my glass of whiskey. It made a sharp, lonely sound.
“I wouldn’t do any of those things,” I said.
“What would you do?”
“I would sleep.”
The Accumulation of Sludge
She laughed. It was a dry sound, like a crackers snapping. “That defeats the purpose. The point is you don’t need it.”
“My body might not need it,” I said. “But I need it.”
I pointed to the window. Outside, the darkness was absolute.
“Being awake is damage,” I said.
“Excuse me?”
“Consciousness is expensive. Every second you are awake, your brain is burning glucose. It is firing neurons. It is accumulating metabolic waste. It is creating toxins. Being awake is a slow process of poisoning yourself.”
I took a sip of the whiskey. It tasted of peat and old wood.
“When you sleep, your brain cells physically shrink. Did you know that? They shrink by sixty percent so that the cerebrospinal fluid can wash through the tissue. It washes away the sludge. It cleans the machine.”
“That’s graphic,” she said.
“It is biology. We are biological engines. We are not software. We cannot run on an infinite loop. If you don’t shut the engine down, the heat will eventually warp the pistons.”
The Silence Between the Notes
I got up and changed the record. I put on Gould playing the Goldberg Variations. The 1981 recording. The slow one.
“Listen,” I said.
The piano notes fell into the room. Precise. Mathematical.
“The music isn’t in the notes,” I said. “The music is in the silence between the notes. If there is no silence, there is no rhythm. There is only noise. A wall of sound.”
I looked at her. She was vibrating with caffeine and ambition.
“Life is the same. Being awake is the note. Sleep is the silence. If you remove the silence, you destroy the song. You become a flat line of productivity. You become a machine that produces, but never is.”
“I just hate the downtime,” she said. “It feels like dying.”
“It is a practice death,” I said. “And that is why it is essential. You have to practice letting go of the world. You have to practice becoming nothing. Only when you become nothing can you wake up and be something again.”
The Heavy Body
I sat back down. My limbs felt heavy. My eyelids felt like they were made of lead.
This was not a bad feeling. It was a perfect feeling. It was the body speaking.
“We stopped listening,” I said. “We drink the coffee. We stare at the blue screens. We shock ourselves into staying awake because we are terrified of missing out. We treat fatigue like an enemy to be defeated.”
“Isn’t it?”
“No. Fatigue is gravity. It is the earth pulling you back to the zero point. It is the body saying: Enough. The damage is done. Now we must repair.”
I finished my drink. The ice had melted.
“If I had those extra eight hours,” I said, “I would still curl up in the dark. I would pull the heavy duvet over my head. I would close my eyes and let the fluid wash the sludge out of my brain. I would let the world spin without me.”
“You’re hopeless,” she said, but her voice was softer now.
“I’m human,” I said. “Broken, heavy, and tired. And right now, that is the most honest thing I can be.”
I stood up and walked to the wall switch.
“I’m turning off the lights,” I said.
And I did. The blue LED of the microwave disappeared. The ambition disappeared. The trading algorithms disappeared.
There was only the dark, and the deep, necessary silence waiting to swallow us whole.
life 