What Insomnia Taught Me
Oh God, midnight’s not bad, you wake and go back to sleep, one or two’s not bad, you toss but sleep again. Five or six in the morning, there’s hope, for dawn’s just under the horizon. But three, now, Christ, three A.M.! Doctors say the body’s at low tide then. The soul is out. The blood moves slow. You’re the nearest to dead you’ll ever be save dying. Sleep is a patch of death, but three in the morn, full wide-eyed staring, is living death!
-Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes
I knew I loved him because I slept next to him after a lifetime of insomnia.
When I say a lifetime, I mean a lifetime. My parents laugh about how little I slept as a child, how I required all manner of rocking and coaxing to drift off as a baby.
Christmas Eve was hell. “5 A.M.,” my mother told me. “Christmas doesn’t start until then.” I counted the minutes in the dark before I could tell time.
At a high-stakes fifth-grade sleepover, once, with a girl who was too cool to be hanging out with me, I woke up at 6. She was a late sleeper. I tried all the old tricks: tickling her nose, accidentally-on-purpose brushing against her arm, fake-coughing too loudly. Nothing worked, so I played dead next to her, my body tensed and rigid.
After I watched exorcist movies for the first time, it got worse. 3 A.M. was the witching hour, the devil at his most lurksome. Bodies and consciences are limpest just before dawn, and souls are atrophied, weak for the plucking. I was convinced mine was especially ripe, hanging loose like rotten fruit. I was afraid of the darkness and afraid of too much light, too — who knows what it would expose.
One lover didn’t like to be touched as he slept. I couldn’t stop myself from clutching at warm nearby skin, so I would inch to the other side of the bed, fearful of crossing a boundary.
Another liked to clutch at me, hard. I would sweat and shake next to him, my muscles never loosening from bone.
My husband is a strong sleeper. He falls asleep on command, and his eyes are light and unburdened, like a baby’s, with his lips pursed a little in contented dreams.
I didn’t tell him about my insomnia the way you don’t take someone aside to tell them you have brown eyes. It just was, and, I assumed, would always be.
“Can’t you sleep?” he asked me over and over in our first months with each other. “Are you OK? What can I do to help?” I hadn’t even considered that it might be a solvable problem.
He started with stories, about princesses and oceans and animals — kid stuff, like the healthy sleep patterns I’d never achieved. His meditation-track voice droned on, drowning out my steady stream of inner monologues. At first, it was an hour. Then half. Eventually, ten minutes, three.
Now my head hits the crook of his arm and I’m instantly awash in sleep, reveling in rest, making up for the years of calm I never got.
