i am an insomniac and i am beyond helping, so don't get any bright ideas. there are times that it feels like i have more to say than i have time to say it; other moments i have more words than there are people to hear them. either way i have learned to live alone, silent, monastic. the words won't go away it seems but from the outside they are less present. i sleep only a few hours at night, the words wake me up. i am awake with them before i realize i am no longer asleep and by then my heart is going pitter-pat and that is that although it is still night and it will be for a long time to come.
the wee hours of the morning, a term i thought belonged to those who might have closed bars as patrons: tipplers i think they were called anachronistically in my youth. i get it now. the time of day in early single digit hours, the 2:00, 3:00, 4:00 are small, wee little numbers and they pass without company in the dark and quiet world. when you are awake in the wee hours of the morning you are very much the owner of the world, so few share the experience with you. keep it, they would tell you if they weren't asleep, like i used to be, like you probably are. i have known nearly every four in the morning since January 2009, say all save maybe ten since then. no kidding. and believe me no one is more surprised than i.
my step-father, brilliant man whom i miss as much as anyone i knew as a child, perhaps most often and most dearly recently (pancreatic cancer) than ever before, he was an insomniac. the word was so mythical and ripe with portent when i was in high school and lived with him. he would go to bed at a decent hour but by 2 or 3 he would be in the living room, watching tv, reading, alone, awake. it was really really odd and i remember being totally baffled as to how it was possible, why would it happen, what did it mean. i really did not have an idea and that, in itself, was unusual because i could usually fathom a visceral back-story or situational awareness even if it was half-wrong. but insomnia was like listening to Mandarin Chinese or seeing someone knit a sweater: a placeholder for empty space. it meant nothing, though it was very very "close to home" and i came across him awake at night the few times i happened to get up for some reason, or came home late as a teenager. a TFM (total fucking mystery) but ever-present. i had no idea.
now i am an insomniac. now i am someone who sleeps one cycle and then not again while it is dark. almost not ever.
and i could not even begin to explain how it is possible because it is as much a TFM now as it ever was except it is happening to me and i would admit often it is for months at a time without interruption. occasionally when my two incredibly beautiful and fantastic daughters are asleep in the house with me i will return after waking, after reading for an hour or so and go back to sleep, somehow, blessedly grateful when i wake up later to find that it happened. waking up with them in the late morning with sun up and birds arguing. but that has only happened a few times.
i would have told you that insomniacs were in need of a mallet to the head and as pathetic as any self-indulgent sad-sack one might encounter. it never ever occurred to me it was beyond their control. i didn't get that they were passengers and not navigators or pilots. i didn't imagine that i would not be able to simply sleep until something got in the way like an alarm, or morning, or my bladder, or whatever it was that we all woke up from in the morning. i once knew sleep such that if i was not made to wake by responsibility or distraction i would stay asleep until the sun was setting and i would be confused as to if it were dawn or dusk. i don't even sleep anywhere near dawn anymore.
i am an insomniac and i am so many nights past being surprised about it. i am insomniac to the point that it is as common as sleep itself. it is the abnormal made normal. i wake and rise and listen to the quiet on the street, the still trees and empty sidewalks. on weekends i listen to the people walking home from the bars they saw close and as they are walking past my home we share an instant in time together, though they are unaware, walking towards their beds; they are soon going to sleep at the same moment that i have recently finished.
i know well what it is to be an insomniac and believe me i am fucking tired.
