insomnia

I write this piece at four in the morning. My legs are restless, eyes sore and heavy. My mind won't shut off, no matter how many sheep sail over my mental fence. In fact, I join in with the sheep, each fence I jump another obstacle into the pasture of life. I worry, I sweat, I often cry. Tonight I am fretting over my writing. It sucks, it's boring, it's cliche.The Pasture of life? Give me a break. The truth is, I am insomniac--or rather, a recovering insomniac. This evening I am revisiting, somewhat conciously, my illness.

The sun comes up whether you've slept or not. The hardest thing about insomnia is that the world doesn't stop for it. You have to keep going, deliriously. It's like trying to enter the Beltway around Washington, DC during rush hour. You don't want to--its fast and scary and you can't concentrate enough to make a move. But, you know that you have to be at work by 8 and there's a line of cars behind you beeping their horns aggressively. And all you want to do is sleep!

So, you get to work, put on a pot of stale Folgers (yes, you are a coffee snob), and down three mugs of it, feeling the sludge-like liquid reverberate off the walls of your stomach. You're eyes aren't puffy today, but they do have a certain hollow quality about them. The movement around the office, the phones, the tap-tap of the keyboard in the cubicle next to you....it's all enough to make you want to scream shut up I haven't slept in three days!You don't do this, because then everyone will know your secret.

That's insomnia.

I never had to drive to work in rush hour traffic, however, only to find myself in a bleak office building with suited men and women drinking bad coffee.I was 21, a college student in DC. The job insomnia hindered? I was a floral designer. Yes, I paid my way through college arranging flowers. Not a bad gig, though like any job, still required energy, concentration, and regular attendance.

Insomnia sucked me of these things. Life with insomnia was incredibly disorienting. I was jumping through the hoops, but not really paying much attention to why I was jumping or where I was going to land. More than once I fell flat on my face. There were tests that were missed, classes I skipped so I could sleep, work that got lied to on many occasions. Either I was sick, sick, or Sick. I found hundreds of ways to be sick, but still managed to avoid the real sickness at hand.

I wouldn't have even considered letting my bosses and professors in on the fact that I had insomnia. Funny, I don't think they would have been sympathetic of a college-aged girl who claimed she could only sleep at 2 in the afternoon. Yet it was true, eerily, depressingly, heartbreakingly true.

And so my sleepless nights continued, month after month.

My boyfriend eventually refused to sleep with me. His warm, snoozing body beside me made things worse, and so he was banned from my bedroom anyway.I attempted to make use of the time I wasn't sleeping. I thought maybe I could readjust my schedule and turn my night into my day and so forth. That only lasted but for so long. I couldn't concentrate at night--I had never been a nighttime person before. The thick quiet of the house, the steady hum of the old fridge, every click and clack and bark of a distant dog sent me to my sheets, reminding me I was not supposed to be hearing these noises, that they were meant for blending in with daytime sounds only to be heard by the nutcases who were actually awake in the silence of night.

I began bonding nicely with Hendrix, my cat. His nocturnal energy was inspiring to me. I took to buying him extravagant, feathered toys and fattening treats. His racous nighttime play took my mind off of my insomnia, temporarily anyway, and we adjusted to each other's schedules. Perhaps I was a cat in a former life.