Prompt: Insomnia
Sopio
After losing his sight, after all of his other senses amplified to compensate, sleep was not something that came easily for Matt. For some people, insomnia is caused by the inability to turn off their mind and their thoughts. For Matt, it happened because he couldn't turn off everything else; his ears and nose and mouth and skin, all flooding him with input that wouldn't let him find a moment's peace.
It was worst at the very beginning, in those first few months where he still woke up and opened his eyes, expecting in the back of his mind for the influx of colors that would solidify the world around him. He couldn't control it then, the way his ears sought out every infinitesimal noise and dragged it into his head like a perpetual vacuum of sound. Days went by where he'd lie awake, hands pressed tight over his ears in a vain attempt to quietquietsilencemakeitSTOP until the doctors worried and injected drugs into his IV that sucked him under like quicksand.
When he finally left the hospital it was with a prescription for sleep aids that his dad couldn't afford to fill but did anyway. Matt only took them when he absolutely had to, when the lack of sleep made him slow and clumsy and stupid, in an attempt to make them last longer. It took time but eventually his body adjusted, learned to function on less sleep in the same way his fingers learned to decipher the grids of dots on the pages of his workbooks and his arm learned the proper position and patterns for using his cane. The insomnia was a symptom of his blindness, and he learned to deal with it just like all the others.
Stick, despite being an ass and unnecessarily cruel sometimes, did help with his sleeping problems. His lessons, on meditation and centering and control over his body, taught him how to shut his senses down. When night came and he was finally allowed to collapse into bed, tired and sore and with his heart still thudding from exertion, he called on those skills to turn the focus of his senses inward. He listened to his heart and his breathing, the gentle pulse of blood gliding beneath his skin, the ache and pull of muscles that were tearing and rebuilding to make themselves stronger. It wasn't a perfect system, and sometimes his mind betrayed him, but it made things easier. His body became his solace and for the first time since the accident he was able to sleep without pills most nights.
College was a frightening new experience for him, not that he'd ever admit that to anyone. Columbia University's campus was a completely different playground, separate and wild compared to the familiar streets and buildings of Hell's Kitchen that were permanently ingrained into his soul now. For the first time in his life he would have to share a room with someone, a cramped and echoing dormitory provided by his scholarship, with paper thin walls keeping the hundreds and hundreds of other voices out. It might've been better for his sleep cycle to pay extra to have his own room, or even find a place off campus, but the money his father had left him was starting to run thin and it wasn't like he could easily go out and find a part-time job on top of his full schedule.
Besides, Murdock boys didn't back down from a challenge.
So Matt traced his fingers over the engraved plates on the doors until he found room 312 and he knocked once before opening the door. The smells reached out to him, cotton and flannel and denim and musk and cheap hair product and day old crisps and paper and dust and sickly sweet soda bubbling against the inside of the open aluminum can. The sounds of movement from every direction, seeping through the walls, gave him a general impression of the room, but his attention was immediately drawn to the eager heart beat of the room's only occupant.
Foggy Nelson turned out to be nothing like Matt was expecting from a roommate. He'd spent the summer preparing to use the blindness as a way to withdraw, to secretly guilt his roommate into leaving him be and causing enough subtle awkwardness to drive him away completely. Matt didn't make friends and he didn't want to spend the next year with the sympathetic gaze weighing on him from across the room. He was better off alone than dealing with that. Instead he found Foggy, whose blunt awkwardness and unbridled enthusiasm wormed its way through his defenses. For the first time in his life he'd found someone who made him feel real, good, whole. Normal.
Matt and Foggy became instantly inseparable, natural extensions of each other, and Matt grew to recognize the sounds of his best friend's body as well as his own. The thud of his heart, naturally faster than Matt's because of his aversion to exercise. The gust of his lungs, only slightly asthmatic but always shallower and restricted on days when the humidity was thick in the air and the moisture muffled everything. The scraping friction of his skin when he twisted his hands together from stress, the rub and drag and slight smell of sweat it always produced. The whisper of his fingers carding through his hair, combing it back off his face whenever they were intently poring over textbooks. Every noise and smell and texture was memorized and cataloged and filed away in Matt's mental image of home and safety and self.
In the end, it was sharing a room - the thing he'd been so worried about - that actually helped him the most. On nights when his brain was too fried from hours of reciting and cramming and filling it with so many laws and bylaws and technicalities and protocols that it felt like it would burst out of his skull, he couldn't draw all of his focus inward. Too much strain on that already exhausted muscle in his head. It was easier to find something else to sink into, to let consume him, and that thing became Foggy. Most nights he was asleep first as Matt continued to trace his fingers over pages in the dark until they grew numb, and then Matt would slip down into his bed and just listen.
He listened to the scuff of fabric on fabric - flannel pajamas pants on cotton sheets - as Foggy found a comfortable spot. He listened to the gradual release of tension as muscles uncoiled and went languid. He listened to the slowing of heart and lungs as his body slipped into stasis. Foggy always snored, a low droning buzz like a far off chainsaw embedded in soft wood (mahogany or walnut), but it was worse when he laid on his left side. Nightmares made his legs twitch and his hands scratch at the sheets like he was trying to grasp something he couldn't hold. Whenever he was most stressed, usually in the weeks leading up to exams, he tended to talk in his sleep; not fully articulate words, but anxious, half-formed syllables dripping from lips that barely moved.
So Matt lay back, surrounded himself in the sounds of homesafetyself, and he slept.