It’s just one of those periods.

The main system is shut down. The monitors are cold, black screens reflecting nothing but the dim streetlights outside my window. But inside my head, the CPU is running at 100% load. A background process I didn’t start is running in an infinite loop, parsing every conversation I’ve had this week, compiling every regret, whispering that maybe I’m just a bad person, and rendering worst-case scenarios for the future.

Sleep shouldn’t be this hard to compute, and yet here I am. (ー_ー)

For a programmer, sleep is supposed to be the garbage collector. It’s when the variables are cleared, the memory leak of daily interactions is patched, and the system resets. But lately, my garbage collector has been failing. I lie in bed, staring at the ceiling, waiting for a shutdown command that never comes.

The Late-Night Blue Screen of the Mind (￣_￣|||)

When you can’t sleep, the silence of the night doesn’t feel peaceful—it feels heavy.

Every tiny sound becomes magnified: the faint hum of the refrigerator down the hall, the occasional car passing by on the street below, the rhythmic ticking of a clock that feels like a countdown to a morning I am not prepared to face.

My mind wanders to the past. I think about the early 2000s, when staying up late was a choice, not a curse. I remember sitting in front of my CRT monitor in a pitch-black room, the heavy blue glow lighting up my face. I’d be chatting on MSN Messenger, waiting for that signature nudge sound, or browsing obscure forums dedicated to retro coding. Back then, the night felt full of discovery and mystery.

Now, the night just feels like a closed loop of thoughts.

               [ Sleep Cycle Diagnostics ]
 
       Insomnia Phase (High CPU, 0% Sleep) 
       ─────────────────────────────────────────►
       [||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||] 100% Thoughts
 
       Hypersomnia Phase (Crash, 12h+ Sleep)
       ◄─────────────────────────────────────────
       [||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||] 100% Fatigue

The Unstable Equilibrium (x_x)

What frustrates me the most is the lack of any stable state. My sleep pattern is like an uncalibrated sensor, swinging violently between two extreme values.

For days, I survive on three or four hours of restless sleep. My eyes are dry, my head feels light, and my social anxiety spikes because I don’t have the energy to parse facial expressions or maintain conversations. I walk around Bari like a buggy NPC, hoping nobody initiates a dialogue option with me. ( ﾟ，_ゝ｀)

And then, the crash comes.

Suddenly, my system triggers an emergency shutdown. I fall into a deep, heavy sleep that lasts for twelve, fourteen hours. I sleep through my alarms, sleep through the morning sunlight, sleep through the afternoon. When I finally wake up, the room is dark again. I don’t feel rested; I feel heavy, disoriented, and covered in a thick layer of mental fog. It’s like waking up from a forced reboot after a critical system crash.

+------------------------------------------------------+
| [!] System Warning: Unstable Sleep Pattern Detected  |
+------------------------------------------------------+
|  Status: Unbalanced Cycles                           |
|  Current State: Sleep Deprived / Crash Impending     |
|  Diagnostics: Social battery critically low          |
+------------------------------------------------------+

What a fragile, broken balance life is. You spend half the week wishing you could close your eyes, and the other half wishing you could pull yourself out of the abyss. There is no middle ground, no steady clock cycle.

Searching for the Reset Button (＿ ＿)zZZ

Maybe this instability is just a reflection of my social battery. After pushing myself to step out of my shell—like my recent journey to Nuremberg and trying to face the world—my brain simply doesn’t know how to throttle down. It runs hot until the power supply cuts out entirely.

I know I should turn off my screens earlier. I know I should stop thinking about layout designs and refactoring code at midnight. But the truth is, the virtual world is where I feel in control. In code, a bug has a logic. A crash has a traceback.

In life, and in my own mind, there are no logs to tell me why the cycle is broken.

So, I’ll just wait here in the dark. I’ll listen to the quiet of Bari, wait for the insomnia to run its course, and hope that tomorrow the system boots up a little more balanced.

Until the next reboot (◡‿◡✿)

Biagio