Insomnia

by Stephen King

until you do, I’m going to keep hammering away. Because I liked you, Ed, and I want to like you again. You’re a bright guy, delusions or no delusions, and I think you can understand me:

“but girls go through a lot of indoctrination. It’s like, ‘Here’s your Barbie, here’s your Ken, here’s your Hostess Play Kitchen. Learn well, because when the real stuff comes along it’ll be your job to take care of it, and if any of it gets broken, you’ll get the blame.’ And I think I could have gone down the line with that—I really do. Except no one told me that in some marriages Ken goes nuts. Does that sound self-indulgent?”

a human being’s capacity for self-deception seemed to be at its lowest ebb between three and six in the morning, and it was now…

you need help. You need to talk to someone about what’s happening to you. Yes. That was the one thing of which he was sure: he needed to spill all this to someone before it drove him crazy. But who?

away!”] This time her laid-back ears cocked forward and her head

everything’s so strange now. All I know for sure is that I want it to be true. I want a friend. I’ve been frightened and unhappy and lonely for quite awhile now. The loneliness is the worst part of getting old, I think—not the aches and pains, not the cranky bowels or the way you lose your breath after climbing a flight of stairs you could have just about flown up when you were twenty—but being lonely.”

“No one talks to you anymore—oh, they talk at you, sometimes, but that’s not the same—and mostly it’s like people don’t even see you. Have you ever felt that way?”

There would only be one chance to do it right.

The truth is that life is both random and on purpose, although not in equal measure. Life is like]

“Trying to help other people is never stupid.”

“Random is crazy. Purpose is sane.”

You’d be cruising along through your day, sometimes feeling great, sometimes just feeling okay, but getting along and getting it done… and then, for no apparent reason at all, you’d go down in flames and crash. A sense of What the hell’s the use would slide over you—unconnected to any real event in your life at that moment but incredibly powerful all the same—and you felt like simply creeping back to bed and pulling the covers up over your head.

He could feel the deathbag all around them, a gloomy, suffocating presence that was passively opposed to forward motion of any kind. That was what they had to fight.