Here it is, after midnight.
If I’m awake, and standing, it’s not for the sake of a good time, or because I’m a night owl by nature. No, I’m awake because I can’t sleep. And I can’t sleep because I tried, and I got a full-leg Charley horse so quick and intense it subsumed me. That happens, sometimes, but it hasn’t for a while.
As people tend to do when they are awake, alone, in the middle of the night, I ruminate.
As people tend to do when they are awake because of pain, I ruminate about the pain.
The Whys
Why today? Why pain now? Yesterday was fine, and the night before was tolerable. With this coronavirus thing, my days march forward with mind-numbing regularity. I didn’t do anything substantially different. Why did it seem to get worse as I lay on the couch? Am I just bad at laying down? Is it the couch? And if it is the couch, then why didn’t things improve when I got up and moved?
I could go on. I will go on, for hours. But if I can be fairly confident about one thing, it’s that the epiphanies I’m likely to have at 3 a.m. are not worth wading through the stream of consciousness to get to. When I’m well-rested and sane, I’ll remember what happens to the quality of my ideas after 11 p.m.
I’ve Been Here Before
I’ve had some practice not sleeping. Back in 2018, a sleepless night was a regular occurrence. On a typical night, I got between two and six hours of sleep, and I was guaranteed at least one no-sleep night each week.
I miss them, sometimes, all those extra hours in the day. I found I could do more than I realized on no sleep. Even when the emails I read on my work computer stubbornly refused to sort themselves into proper words and sentences, my responses, when I read them back later, were surprisingly coherent. I was glad to read them. I certainly didn’t remember the facts I’d typed up.
Where Are the Other Insomniacs?
I often wondered about the other sleepless people, back in the bad old days, in the middle of the night. I assumed they were all in online forms and social media, like I was, trying to find another person out there to talk to. I assumed they were also looking for some human connection that would tether them to the physical world. But we must have all been looking blindly, in different places, because I never did find where all those imaginary other people congregated. I imagined some large game of Marco Polo where everyone is It and no one speaks.
Maybe those other people were absorbed, happy or distressed, in their own little worlds. Perhaps they had picked up their own work project, or paged through a book, or decided it was a good time to organize the garage. Perhaps they had opened their medicine cabinet, and found something that would carry them off properly.
Deep Nights Are Magic Realism
I remember those sleepless nights, but I am my own unreliable narrator. In the midst of extreme sleep deprivation, with the sun nowhere in sight, reality shifted. It became optional. I watched The Day the Earth Stood Still and it was the evening news. Or maybe I didn’t see it, and my mind projected a movie of the same name.
When I went to the bathroom, I was Snow White lost in the woods. Insects swarmed over my desk for a moment, and then flitted away. They were there, and they were not there, and there was no contradiction. Everything I saw was framed by a fuzzy black scrim. Creatures and shapes flitted in and out as they pleased.
That was, as I have said, all before. A sleepless night now is only very still. The air conditioner hums along. An occasional flashing light from an emergency vehicle flashes outside the window. There is endless space here, for the thoughts, the ruminating, the whys. And who knows? Perhaps tonight’s the night I figure it all out.
