At first it was easy to blow off. Missing a few hours

or maybe it was days by now

of sleep was no big deal, right? Shit, people did it all the time before the world ended. But that kind of lifestyle starts to wear on you real quick- that's what they didn't tell you.

Daryl sat on a stump, staring blearily at his feet. What day was it? Hard to know. Time kind of ran together after… well, After Sophia. The minute she staggered out of that barn, that shithole filled with had-been-humans, the world ended all over again. Least ways, that was how it seemed.

Everything felt so heavy. His limbs were like lead, even his eyelids seemed too cumbersome to lift. Breathing was another struggle in and of itself. Living had suddenly become oppressive, unnatural. Something you had to work at, rather than it just happening.

Sleep. He'd never really sat back and thought about it before. It happened most every night, a few hours of nothingness where the body rests while the mind wanders. Even after the walkers came, it was still pretty easy to drift off for a while at night.

every day was so damn exhausting, it was almost impossible not to sleep

Except for now. Now, every time he closed his eyes, he saw death. He saw a lost child, a weeping mother, and utter devastation. Sometimes he was just watching Rick pull the trigger, other times he was the one who put the bullet in Sophia's head. Didn't matter much, though- it was enough to break a man any way you looked at it.