Crosspoint

    Above me is the pale white speckled ceiling. The overhead light is off, but a light on my wall is on making the ceiling to the left making the light brighter to the left than off to the distant right. Rising up from beyond my left shoulder is the entrance to the closet. A mosquito or some other small bug comes dancing out of the closet and bounces along the wall and the ceiling to some random rhythm that I do not hear or recognize. For a while my eyes watch this play while my brain continues in the insomnic numbness of a man who wants to sleep but cannot.
    A draft causes the door beyond my feet to open another quarter inch and then close itself with a note of finality. This sound pulls my eyes away from the flittering bug. Silence again covers the night like a thick blanket. There are three metallic ticks from somewhere beyond my room. As if waiting for that cue the heat begins flowing into my room. I cannot see the ventilation shaft to the right of the door beyond my feet, but I can hear the steady flow of air.
    To my right there rises from the ground four towers of bookshelves stretching nearly to the darker shade of ceiling. Once the books on those shelves were nearly organized. But now they relax haphazardly as they remain wherever they were placed above or in front of the rows that once confined them. One book that has escaped the shelves completely lies open on my bed near my right shoulder to page 105. Until recently I had been gleaning the wisdom that book can offer, but while my eyes continued to march across the lines at a steady pace, my brain was finding it more and more difficult to keep up and abandoned the project as a lost cause. It is much easier to watch the mosquito dance with the broken cobweb to the time of the currents draft.
    Slowly my eyes close. They are the last part of my body to give in to the weary war against sleep. As the light fades away there is nothing left to notice that the battle has been lost. Night is the uncelebrated victor and sleep claims for itself an inevitable victim.
    
    When those eyes reopen it is in another world completely. Dark. Everything is dark, but this is not truly noticeable. Even though very little can be seen beyond the immediate vicinity, there is that dreamlike understanding that this is a very busy place. The unseen world beyond what my mind has chosen to highlight carries an ambience of urgency. Although I can sense that I am in a field hospital on some battlefront, the background soundtrack my brain has chosen for this reality would be more fitting for a packed convention hall after the speaker has said his piece but before the building has truly begun to empty. There is the noise of chatter coming from everywhere.
    The one thing my mind has chosen to highlight out of the cluttered darkness is a hospital gurney in front of me and slightly to my right. With his back to me I can see the frantic work of a doctor trying to save the unseen patient. My mind tells me that I know the nurse that I can see on the other side of the hospital bed, but there are no physical characteristics that my reasoning mind can distinguish as recognizable. Such is the way of dreams.
    As this doctor and nurse team continue to focus solely on the patient in front of them, I can begin to hear the electronic measuring of the patients heartbeat steadily rising against the noise of my unseen environs. Just as that sound comes to the forefront of my attention, the heartbeat flatlines. I can see the doctor lower, and then shake his head in resignation. Taking off his gloves and mask he turns and directs his attention to me. With a raspy voice he says, "If youre gona make the change, you need to do it now. Were running out of time here."
    Turning his back to me, the doctor moves to join the nurse who is already at the next bedside. Although I can still hear the steady noise coming from the patient who died now directly to my left. In front of me I can now also hear the electronic heartbeat of the patient the doctor and nurse are now trying to save. The chatter I first heard has come to a halt while I was not paying attention to it. It seems as if a million unseen people have ended their conversations and have turned their invisible eyes to me in anticipation.
    I know what I must do. The desire within me to act is so strong that my hands are shaking. But I also know what my actions will cost me. In light of my dream world around me, this sacrifice is nothing, yet I still run my hands through me very short hair and close my eyes in indecision. As the word goes dark through those shut eyes, I can hear the sound of another dying heart joining the first.

    My eyes reopen to reality. I am back in my bed with a thick black comforter around me. The lamp on the wall is still shunting its uneven light across the pale ceiling. The mosquito seems to have disappeared from the northwest corner, but the sound of heat pumping its way into my room remains. For a moment the urgency I felt in my dream remains, but it gradually fades while I continue to stare motionlessly at the ceiling above me. I am still safely and securely caught in the clutches of apathy.
    I turn my head to look at the book I had been reading earlier. It is titled, A Chance To Die. What need of that when I have not yet even begun to live?