The Insomniac's Lament
Felix R.
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The Insomniac's Lament is a labor of exhaustion. I originally began writing the poems this play is based on in 2021. Towards the beginning of the year, I was going through a rough time and was very sleep deprived. On some of the worst nights, I would stay up just scribbling out my thoughts into a notebook. Later, I revisited the notebook and found the raw beginnings of some poetry that I barely remember writing at all. I felt that the poems represented me at a very important time in my life, and needed to be completed. I was very proud of the finished poems, but knew that they could be something more. With this project, I wanted to explore the headspace I was in and the person I was in 2021. The poems remain part of this piece, but they have transformed into dialogue and overarching story. Now they exist to serve a purpose for Hypnos, as they did for me. Hypnos is me... basically. He is the boy who writes all night out of desperation to share what he feels and love for the art itself. Nyx is everything that I thought was wrong with my life at the time, but also the good things that I just wasn’t recognizing. They both also happen to be Greek gods. The mythological inspiration present in this piece was an unexpected discovery for me, but it felt so natural once I had found it. To me, Greek myths have always been the most hyperbolic expressions of emotion for me, and the myths of Hypnos and Nyx are the most relevant to this piece. This play is the final evolution of that poetry, and the final work I will be doing surrounding insomnia. At this point, I have completely exhausted it.
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My creativity is my sole expression of how I interact with the world, and how I feel the world interacts with me. Writing lets me put into words what I experience, and gives me the unique opportunity to put a fun twist on reality.
