Red Shift
He looks up. The feeling of sickness and dread in his stomach is unavoidable. Another sleepless night. The dreams he should be enjoying in a stasis of invincibility must now manifest themselves in his consciousness, able to hurt him, able to render him incapacitated with a fraction of the intensity that would be required in his wakeless state. Although fighting these apparitions and pervasive thoughts is possible, it is so exhausting as to render him vulnerable and weathered. After only so long can a man exhaust his energies and faiths. And so he looks up, staring at the dark, hoping there is only an abyss of nothingness into which to stare.
He should be spoken to and not heard. But when he listens, his interest is unsatisfactory. His apparent restlessness is abrasive, his pondering caustic, his caution inauspicious. He is browbeaten in his futile attempt at obligation. His eyes grow heavy and lined with blackness. His lids close gradually, the world falling into a meshed haze of uncertainty. Just as he opens the door to the traumatic, he is jerked conscious briefly by a shutter. The nightmare continues in a complacent co-conspiracy between prostration and acquiescence.
He needs salvation. He needs absolution. He needs fortitude. And so he hopes.