Bright-eyed and visionless

When I was young and slumbering on my lofty top bunk, there were times when I would see strange shapes and forms floating in the darkness. After all the lights had been switched off, and even that persistent glow of the city had come to rest, they would appear. Clumped together in fuzzy particle shapes, they were some fantastic puzzle from a video game. They would drift every which way, directionless, circular and structured like honeycomb with cotton-swabbed circumferences. The blackscape background would seep through them, as if they were lumps of transparent cells being scrutinized by a boy's microscope. I would remain an observer, silent but aware, following them with my eyes. These sessions could last hours as they scrolled and swayed across the spectrum of my room like a hand-cranked homemade pseudo-television, and I sat there, wordlessly awake, not sure whether I should scream out in horror or celebrate congenially with these flying geometries. Maybe they were disease, virus, pesticide, spore. Maybe curious life forms studying my species. Whatever the explanation, they brought some sort of company to the bleak darkness that held me and my sleeping brother below on the bottom bunk.

These shapes no longer appear to me. The haze of semi-twilight that forms when I press my eyes shut and crinkle my forehead produces a semblance of those friendly airborne visitors I once knew, but they're fraudulent, fakes. The switched-light city-buzzing darkness of my youth is now as barren as the void of space. Occasionally at night, I'll still seek and search the emptiness for my old acquaintances, only to be discouraged by my lack of discovery and fall asleep broken or covering my eyes. And I realize now that my old sights were but illusions, tomfoolery played on the energetic and imaginative mind of a sleepless youth who was confounded by growing up and the oddities that swam in the world he was immersed in.

My, how I miss the nighttime constant of those dear old friends. Now they're not much more than idle reminders of a childhood that once was mine.