What crawls into bed (short story)

Can't close my eyes. If I close them I don't know what will happen, I've never believed in monsters, robots or anything coming out of the collective unconscious, I guess I'm too smart to believe in those sort of things. Being smart however sometimes doesn't leave anything good behind, it takes a lot more to make someone happy, or to bring them peace of mind.

I remember my great grandma, no one ever talked about it, but I knew, I could tell because whether I like it or not I was the same as her. There are many terms, I used to think the old woman was just crazy, she mistook people, places and was always completely extroverted in a way that made people notice her. Perhaps she was crazy, but for some reason even if I couldn't see a method to her ways, she could understand things better than most. I don't know if she was so smart that no one could understand how she seemed to know everything or if she was just delusional, but she even predicted her own death.

I do believe in death, and somehow, she was able to take a peak in the list. That has to count for something, even if I doubt she could tell I was her great grandson most of the time. She lived in her own world created from her mind, and I used to think that was her choice, she simply grew bored of reality and made her own. I'm not so sure anymore.

I can't close my eyes. I hear them crawling, everything, every muscle moving, every sound I shouldn't hear. I can see them in the dark, approaching, moving, lurking. Not only that, but I know what happens when you are not aware, when you are defenseless. When you are outside and not watching your back.

I remember walking into a cemetery to visit my grandma, I didn't even knew her, so when everyone expected me to feel sorry for her death I didn't know how to react. Hell, now years later, my grandpa's second wife died, I did know her and I still couldn't feel the same grief that everyone else seemed to ask of me. I've never been good at dealing with death, I am aware of it, I know it's after all of us, I guess I will just know when it's my time. The problem is, there are way worse things than death. So I'm at this cemetery, I can't feel grief but my childish mind is afraid of the dead. My mom, she looks at me and tells me. "Son, it's not the dead you need to be afraid of, it's the living"

I think that's the day I stopped getting scared of horror movies, I stopped having nightmares about monsters coming out for me, I saw monsters for what they were, but it also triggered something else. That constant feeling of being watched, everywhere, all the time. Your mind playing tricks, the shadows moving in the dark, the sounds of things that are not there, haunting me.

Bugs, crawling up my bed, strangers following me home. I can see them all the time, hear them, never letting go. I start to live in my imagination, because if you are the only one that can hear or see something, does that mean it doesn't exist? If something doesn't exist how can it have an effect on someone? Isn't that how monsters came to be in the first place? They say that the greatest minds are usually the most cursed ones as well. Most geniuses would be deemed insane by any psychologist.

I just know that closing my eyes means they win, they get me in my dreams, and it's way worse than anything they can do to me while awake. My consciousness protects me of the perils of my mind, what happens at night? Where no one can hear you scream. It's hell. But my eyes can't hold on for longer, and I can already feel the presences around me, they know I'm about to let go. And I do.