I am Jack the Insomniac, a kind of Rip Van Winkle in reverse. Twenty years of insomnia is fine, but it is part of my gift that I do not accept the gift. I resist wakefulness. I can’t help it, when everybody else goes to bed I get lonely. I want to go to bed too. In fact I am dying to sleep. I do all the rituals well the walking in circles, the salutation to the sun, tense, efficient, now a hot bath stirred sideways, the brisk shit, the harried read, and now to dread to bed. Yes, I get in the bed and I lie down and then I remember the sleeping tea! I get up, head to the kitchen, prepare the tea and return to bed. Maybe the TV will help. There are talk shows on. These are sedative. Where’s my Vicks? My tryptophan? I lie down finally and turn and click and switch and stick my head up one side and watch awhile like that. Then I click again till I think I must surely be getting tired. I lie flat now, the pillow under my neck. I take a deep breath, forgetting who I am, and think I’ll just listen and click, not that, click, not that, click . . .
It’s been three nights. I can feel a big ball of sleep submerged in my being, luxuriant, enticing but impenetrable. Several times the ball wells up, overwhelming the little bit of mind, an image dancing, slides, I might just take this ticket but no, click, remember I am Jack the Insomniac. If I am not asleep by two I’ll take the tryptophan. I can still sleep four hours, be up by six and my world is dancing, but I just missed that ticket. There is a small magnetic sound in the house and I remember. I need the fan on. I get up, creep in the other room where people are snoring, lovely faces opaque with desire, destiny, inner alertness, comfort and dreams, and without envy I remove the fan, take it down. Aaaaah. That will probably do it. I lie back down. If I’m not asleep by three I’ll take the tryptophan. Aaaaah the luxury of sleep. To live in instantly created environments tangential to the worry, the hassle, the domain, the plentitude of the sleepless one. When will he accept that he is vibrating? When will he accept that his spine stands straight up above the bed like a divining rod to his soul shouting, “Son of water, you are Jack the Insomniac”? I have danced in a lyrical way the world would love and just as I would come down skidding, madly sliding into sleep, I slither, I scrape, I stop. There is a sound or a moment in the throat that draws me up again out of the fertile water, still hooked to the sharp curve of the night when I lost everything, gave up comfort, rhythm, vitality, to become a guardian, a watcher, a werewolf. My being vibrates between the two worlds. Some of it in, some of it out. Bits going backward, bits being erased, bits not even making it to memory or moment at all. But they’re all there and fucking awake anyway. I begin to pray: please God help me, please God let me sleep. I want to go upstairs and apologize to my children. I want to wake up my beloved and weep of my love for her. I am a much deeper being here. The wave has had to come up into this world to get me. A giant on the thin bed, this man who fell out of time, opiate-eyed but wide awake. What a blossoming to strip off the skins of sleep seven layers deep to enter this new life naked, but what I’d give to spread wide at last these two leaden wings of insomnia and fall.