When you don’t go to sleep, the coming of morning is really no big deal. there is no relief in the changing of the day, just a new lit-up weirdness to acclimatize to after what has usually, surely, been a whole long night of weirdnesses.
like last night for example when, after an ill-advised coffee drink at just shy of 8pm and a diet coke even later than that, i found myself
wide a-fucking-wake the whole night through. at eleven or so we got into bed and soon after that she was asleep, despite the light from the little lamp on my side table by which i read; she was making those interminably wholesome sounds of soft, comfortable sleep. she gets up earlier than i do, so often i read after she has gone to sleep for a half an hour or so, or until my eyes get that weighted down feeling and suddenly the light is too bright and all i want is to burrow down and click off the lamp and close my eyes for sleep, huddling up to her sleeping back which emanates a reassuring, peaceful sort of heat under the blankets.
last night the eyes were still wide open and alert and i knew i had been reading longer than usual. i leaned over to look at the little clock on her side of the bed. 2am. but who cared, thought i, not like i had anything concrete to be alert for tomorrow, so i’d be a little tired on just five hours sleep.
big whoop.i turned the light off and shimmied down under the covers next to her and closed my eyes and really tried for as long as i could to convince my caffeinated brain and body that it was now nigh’-nigh’ sleepy times for suzie q (me). but it was not to be. my mind was loop-da-looping and my feet and legs had
a real case of the jimmies. i was fidgety in my bones and in my skin; i was even mentally fidgety, and that isn't a good feeling at the best of times, let alone the lonely bleakness of an endless sleepless night.
i tried another of my proven fail-safes for finding sleep: plain old counting. starting at 1 and going up. i think the idea is to get myself into some sort of natural rhythm, so that i forget about the thoughts still rabble rousing around in the old noodle and just breathe, count, breathe, count. usually it really works.
i am no stranger to insomnia, historically. or perhaps more accurately, i am still and have always been a chronic stay-up-later. something about being awake deep into the night still thrills me the way it did when i was thirteen, staying up all night at a sleepover with ten other girls, chugging coca cola in the wee hours to prolong our awakeness, to forge on ‘till morning with the eating of millions of potato chips and watching of teen movies and schlocky horrors.
invariably at these parties i was always the last one to fall asleep, long after the 2nd movie stopped rolling through the vcr and the blue screen of the television was the only vivid light in the room and around me nine sleeping girls snorted, sniffed and murmured in their happy sleep.
anyway. so often, more recently, when i haven’t had a reason to get up before say 11am, i have reveled luxuriously in staying up until the last possible moment, well into the dark folds of the night. i try to succumb to sleep only at the point of total physical and mental collapse.
the problem with this predilection for nocturnality (and the masochism inherent in gleefully depriving oneself of sleep) is that it is easy to miss the pretty little window of exhaustion that a lot of people take for granted, pushing through it sometimes knowingly and sometimes absently, but nevertheless leaving it behind like a train through the mouth of a tunnel.
in school this manifested every time i had an assignment due the next day. in 5 years of post-secondary and graduate education i never missed one deadline for any assignment, which i take / took some sort of pride in, although it came at a cost. i never really panicked about a deadline that loomed 12 hours away because i knew those were all 12 usable hours. i could drink coffee or tea (sometimes whiskey or wine, although this is always a threat to the successful all-nighter), smoke cigarettes, and fend off sleep with all my maniacal might, howling away at the keyboard until the goddamned thing, whatever it was, was finished. truthfully, i sort of set myself up for insomnia in this way: forming some sort of essentialist entanglement with my ability to be wild and creative and the lateness of the hour; as in, the later the better for optimal everything.
my lucidity and ability to cohere thoughts and use language in a way that didn't come out as
alien, mindless drunken jibberjabber in these all-night academic binges usually stopped around 6am, but no deadline was ever set for 6am. something might be due at 8:30 or 10, but never 6; so the inevitable question was always whether to drop into a dead sleep for an hour and a half or two, waking up with a head full of the hazy candlewax of interupted sleep and just enough time to get to school, or to press on to total sleeplessness: drink more coffee, eat some food, smoke a cigarette outside in the cold air, and just ride out the waves of weirdness caused by complete lack of sleep.
but rarely in the last few years have i actually suffered from non-willful insomnia, like the kind i had last night. the bastard kind that comes up on you when you don’t want it, aren’t inviting it, don’t know what to do with it. the kind that comes up on you every goddamned night, night after night after night, and no reprieve. the kind that makes you understand certain weirdnesses about humanity because you have lived and breathed those weirdnesses yourself in the smallest hours of morning. i have known this kind myself but, gratefully (and thanks in part to the
wonders of pharmacology), i find sleep almost all nights these days.
i dated a woman briefly several years back who had that kind, the terrible kind. she had it from the time we first got together to the time we split—6 weeks later—that whole time and i don’t think she ever slept more than maybe an hour or two every night, often not even that much. i’d wake up at seven when her alarm went off faithfully every day. if she was still in bed, she would be wide a-fucking-wake already, and i’d know the instant i looked at her weary, furrow-browed expression that she had had yet another sleepless night. i felt guilty for having enjoyed such a thorough, deep, satisfying sleep while she lay in bed in the dark and stewed all night in her insomnia. if she wasn’t still in bed, which was most often the case, it was because she was running up a mountain or swimming a hundred lengths or biking to the edge of the ocean and back or going to the gym for an early morning roundrobin tournament of racquet ball. for someone who i happen to know for a fact was operating on an insanely low amount of sleep this woman had unfathomable energy. i got at least 6 or 7 hours every night and she made me feel like slow-motion footage of an injured, aging, wet snail, sort of slumping and oozing around from place to place, agonizingly slow compared to her ceaseless, almost mystical bounds of energy.
but i digress. last night i gave up counting as a tactic to invite sleep when i reached 300. at 300 it’s usually pretty goddamned clear that it ain’t happening that way tonight, bub. it was pretty obvious at 300 that sleep was going to play the illusive little minx and to wait for it to befall me now was to be played a fool. i sat up a little in bed and turned the light back on. 3:00am. oh man. i was really in it now.
i finished a david sedaris book and read the latest vice magazine.
3:30am. turned the light off and turned her computer on in order to dink around on the interweb. spent 45 minutes trawling aimlessly, directionless, ingesting massive amounts of mostly useless and repetitive crap, with the crazed white light of the screen shining up into my rods and cones, perhaps in an attempt to actually bore or blind myself to sleep.
at the end of that 45 mins my eyes still weren’t getting that weighted down feeling, although frazzled from the screen, and my spiritual insides felt the way i might feel if i ate an entire bag of salted potato chips of an evening or smoked a whole pack of cigarettes in one night or sat down and watched every episode of temptation island back to back. in all those cases, that’s a hell of a lot of crap to get down and the end result (in all those cases), is a sense of wastefulness, and the cold, hard feeling of being vaguely depressed by everything. i closed the computer and plunged the room back into near-blackness. some negligible light came in through the window, the diffused orange of the streetlamps through an ambling, light snowfall.
now past 4am, i was still as awake as if i’d injected my eyeballs with pure undiluted caffeine. and that cold hard feeling of being vaguely depressed is nobody’s sweetheart at 4am with eyeballs full of caffeine and a dark bedroom still two and a half hours from when her alarm would go off. i worried about whether i was fucking up her sleep and turned to look at her; she was sleeping just as sweet as a little lamb; no complaints from that side of the bed.
i wondered what time the buses started to run on ossington. i could check online but the thought of looking at a computer screen for one more second made my face wince in the dark and anyway i didn’t want to light up the room again. there is a 24 hour diner a few blocks away and i considered getting up to go for an enormous breakfast there. the last thing i’d put in my belly was that goddamned coffee and now it (my belly) was very unhappy with the state of affairs in there and churned and churned emptily, hungrily searching for some morsel to work over and finding none. and there i was lying in the pitch dark with my gut freaking out and
my eyes like tea cups against the dark of 430am in the morning.
her room is invariably hot, dry and lacking any naturally occurring moisture levels; even with the window wide open to the winter air and the humidifier sending up regular bursts of steam, we both often wake up gasping for liquid, throat and eye sockets bone dry. this is what’s happening now, at 430am. i am too hot, and my throat is dry, my nasal passages are one hundred percent shut down for any functional use, and the blankets feel too heavy or too wrong across my frame, and now i am getting feisty with my physiology for keeping me awake on a night when i am in a room with someone i love and whom i do not want to disrupt and in a room which is too small for me to get out of bed and do anything unless i just got up and sat at her little desk which would be weird because i’d have to do it in the dark and then what? then i’d just be awake and sitting in a hard chair instead of a soft bed in the dark, and then things would really get weird. i could tell. i decided to stay put. but this decision makes me shuffle and writhe and sigh and thrash about in bed with unquellable awakeness, and then i worry about waking her up or disturbing her again, and then i think about getting up again. but where to go.
i think when you dupe yourself (or yourself dupes you) out of a night’s sleep, the mind compensates for the lack of scheduled shut-down-and-dream time by sort of sending up bubbles from your subconscious that you might not ordinarily conjure unless you were sleep-deprived and getting a bit weird.
oh, i thought about all kinds of things this long night.
i thought about how much i adore her.
i thought about not being able to sleep on christmas eve as a child and being worried that if i stayed up past midnight santa wouldn’t be able to come to our house. i thought about how i sort of believed in santa maybe even until i was nine or ten, because i once had a vivid dream that i spied his sleigh flying towards our country farmhouse, across the snowy, moonlit shorn cornfield, just as it would look if it were really happening. such that when i woke i felt that i had been touched by something truly otherworldly.
i thought about this old guy named slim who pushes his belongings in a shopping cart up and down st. clair. the first time he saw me he asked my name, my star sign, introduced himself and asked whether i would like to go and have a cup of tea and get to know each other. i obliged the first two and declined the tea. the next time i saw him he said ‘is this that redheaded pisces’ and i smiled and said ‘hi slim’.
this time he was straight to the quick with it and asked me again to go on a date with him to drink a hot beverage and get to know each other better. he was walking alongside me, his cart out in front. ‘i may not be no god’s gift to the females,’ he said seriously. ‘but just tell me truly, do i have a shot of gettin’ to be your man.’
i had to laugh. ‘afraid not,’ i said. ‘nope.’
‘ok,’ he said, considering this. ‘ok. can i ask why?’
when i told him the truth he said the same thing i have been told by probably at least 25 other heterosexual men on their learning that i am not interested in their (often lewd and just downright STUPID) advances for reasons of my preternatural attraction to (mostly) people
other than heterosexual men.
i had been prepared to walk away from slim still basically liking him, leaving amiably and agreeably, and then he had to say the same fucking thing they always say, and instantly our whole togetherness was a little bit spoiled, mine and slim's. he said:
maybe you just haven’t met the right guy(FOOTNOTE 1) yet. sweetheart.
then i thought about my dead father and how he taught my brother and i to catch freshwater fish in the lakes and streams of ontario growing up. i thought about the time that i asked my brother to detach for me a finicky hook from the maw of some bass or pickerel, and how it was clear to him as soon as i handed the floopsy-flopsy fishy over that the poor bastard had swallowed the hook down clear and good down into his gullet. i remember my brother looked at me and i could tell by the look on his face it wasn't good.
he wrenched the hook and line from the fish's depths, and with it came up a fast blur of red and pink and white--the innards of the fish, complete in a horrible still beating, still breathing mass. and not as disturbing, possibly, as the sight of the fish turned inside out before my eyes, was the sound that loosed from its lips (?) at the point of excision... a horrible, wheezing, almost humanely recognizable sound of pain, of painful air being let out of a painful balloon, and it seemed to me the fish was screaming out in pain, and i sat down lightheaded in the bottom of the boat and didn't touch another rod. and haven't still, although i've since gone back to eating fish.
i sat up in bed and squinted over at the little clock on the bedside table. it was five o-fucking-clock. she murmured a bit at my movement on the bed and i slid down to stroke her face with my open palm, smooth a rogue lock of hair from her warm brow, to kiss her lightly on the jawline, on the neck, on the side of the head. she woke up slightly, and as though instinctively feeling my mania out there in the darkness said softly, ‘are you ok?’
‘yes,’ i said, staring up at the ceiling as she curled into me. ‘but i haven’t been to sleep yet.’
‘oh god,’ she said. ‘what! why not? what are you thinking about? was something keeping you up?’
‘no no,’ i tell her. ‘nothing like that. i suspect it was the coffee at just shy of 8pm last night.’
‘oh god, baby,’ she says. ‘that would do it.’ she murmured something incomprehensible and possibly leftover from the last dream she dreamt. her eyes were still closed in the hazy pre-dawn room. she fell back asleep and i continued to stare at the ceiling.
another hour passed and finally the gnawing in my belly was too overpowering to ignore and i feared that if i didn’t leave the room in the next ten minutes i would actually go right off the deep end. as usual, there came a point in the insomnia of manic urgency—i had to end the night; stop playing the charade that sleep might come after all; just get up and suck it up and take the bus ride home. so to speak.
and so that’s what i did.
i stumbled from her front stoop, bleary-faced and already freezing in my too-light jacket. the previous night’s temperate mildness had been replaced by a new dusting of snow and a morning wind that whipped and howled up ossington as i trudged towards the bus stop. it was too early to smoke but i wanted one anyway. i always used to smoke on handing in one of those due-in-the-morning assignments, even though it was ordinarily too early in the day for me to actually enjoy it and not just feel sick. while i waited for the blue lights of an approaching northbound bus, i cowered in the glass cubicle on the sidewalk and rolled up a cigarette out of the wind. it seemed an angry kind of cold, out there alone on the street at 630am. the sun was nowhere near risen and the sky was still the charcoal purple/grey and hazy orange of nighttime in the city.
when the bus approached i spat down the cigarette to the gutter without removing my hands from where they were all pins and needles from the cold deep inside my trench coat’s pockets. i flashed my pass and took a seat and stared at the other passengers. my mind was not by any means operating at full capacity. i could feel the candle wax in my mind, rattling around from lack of sleep. who were these people on the bus with me this early? how many hours of sleep had they each had? where were they going? where were they coming from? where did they work? what were they listening to in those little headphones? were they good people? kind people? did they have pets these people? my mind raced as the bus ambled on.
i stared out the steamy window at the frosted roads and cars upon them, my eyes unfocused and unfixed, just listless there, googly-eyed in the coming morning.
FOOTNOTES:
1. the noted noun in this sentence (GUY) is sometimes replaced (by the lewder and stupider of these specimens) with any of your various school-yard, prison-yard, lumber-yard terminologies for the heterosexual male phallus.
2. the titular 'howling fantods' of this piece is ripped directly from david foster wallace's infinite jest.
3. 'fantod': a state of worry or nervous anxiety.
