I am awake
It’s 3am. I always find myself here, some version of here. Awake when others are asleep. I keep my eyes closed. Maybe if I stay still enough I’ll fall back asleep. Thirty minutes pass but it feels like time has stopped altogether. Still awake. I meditate, counting one on the inhale and one again on the exhale, making it to sixty. Still awake. I open my eyes and roll them, a desperate and failed attempt to release frustration in a silent way so that I don’t throw my pillow across the room, waking Perry who sleeps so effortlessly next to me. How nice it must be to fall and stay in the sleeping realm. I yearn to be there in all it’s comforting shimmery layers, like the cradle of the sea. But here I am, left alone in the dark and the silence with nothing but my thoughts.
I fantasize about exercising, pushing my body so hard that it will have no other choice but to collapse and fall asleep. But I’ve tried that before, many times, and it only leads to a body that folds into itself. Legs like boiled spaghetti and a still-running mind. I sit up and curl myself around the dog, listening to his soft breath against the blanket he’s balled himself into. I match my breath with his and am filled with gratitude for his existence and then immediately after filled with fear for the day that he doesn’t. Sixty minutes have passed.
I get out of bed to use the bathroom even though I don’t have to go. But it’s worth a shot, maybe then I can fall asleep. I catch a glimpse of myself in the dim lighting of my bathroom and think how flabby my cheeks look. Is it the lighting or have I really aged this much? I pull the skin tight ever so slightly and notice how it’s a bit of both. I’m reminded of my grandmother and how I’d watch her do this very same thing in the mirror when I was a little girl. I shut off the light and pause at the top of the stairwell in the dark, the room painted in a faint green glow from the screen of the thermostat.
I’m reminded of the monitor I used to watch in Dad’s room at the end of the hall by the meth lab he built in the garage. The monitor that streamed the feed from the secret camera he had hidden at the front door of our sun-beached house, unnoticed off the old Route 66. The green glow from the screen that reflected back into my tired eyes well into the lost hours of the night. Maybe not much has changed.
Back in my room I take a drink of water. I climb back into bed and sigh into the mattress. My throat hurts. I reach for my phone, a sign that I’ve given up on finding sleep tonight. I search for things to read. 52 Blue by Leslie Jamison that fills me with both loneliness and independence at the same time.
“We project our fears and longings onto everything we’re not—every beast, every mountain—and in this way we make them somehow kin. It’s an act of humbling and longing and claiming all at once.”
A piece in The New York Times by Lauren Groff (whom I love) in praise of Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights which feels appropriate. A meeting of brilliant minds.
“In reading certain works, not all works, I do sometimes enter a sort of hallucinatory state and I think I see undercurrents and light in dark places about the imagined emotions and actions.”
A speech by Bill Watterson, the creator of Calvin and Hobbes on Brain Pickings. I drink it in, every word. I read it again and my heart aches for how much I needed it and didn’t realize that I did.
“You’ll be told in a hundred ways, some subtle and some not, to keep climbing, and never be satisfied with where you are, who you are, and what you’re doing. There are a million ways to sell yourself out, and I guarantee you’ll hear about them.
To invent your own life’s meaning is not easy, but it’s still allowed, and I think you’ll be happier for the trouble.”
I swallow and bring my hand to my swollen throat. It’s past 5am now. There’s no entering the sleeping realm. I sit up and kiss the dog, pausing to press my ear to his side and listen to the sound of his stomach gurgling. Perry stirs but doesn’t wake. I go downstairs and make English breakfast tea and think of my cousin who lives in England. The house is dark. The world outside turns a murky blue. Streams of gold from the headlights of cars passing flicker and disappear. Where are they going? The whole country is in lockdown. The world in quarantine. I take a sip of my tea. The birds are beginning to sound. I am awake.