Sunday, July 20, 2008

"Insomnia"

I have always thought myself a bad sleeper. The Light says I’m not. She thinks I sleep just fine and she should know because she’s a card-carrying insomniac. Nonetheless, I have been struggling to sleep lately and it’s me who’s sitting up tonight with nothing for company but a laptop and the comforting curses of the drunks outside.

I think that one reason I’m awake is that I’m sad right now. In the last couple of weeks I’ve become increasingly aware of the impending anniversary and I don’t know what to do with the realization. I don’t know what feels worse – that it feels like just yesterday or that just yesterday feels so long ago; that it still hurts or that it doesn’t hurt quite so much as it did … how strange that less pain can somehow feel more painful.

I was certainly a bad sleeper as a kid. What kept me awake was the suspicion that adults were lying and that secretly they knew no better than me and were every bit as terrified. How sobering to discover that’s true even if I do now deal with the terror a whole lot better than my childhood self.

Flying scares me too. I once had a girlfriend who was an even worse flyer than me and I quite liked sitting next to her on a plane – I found my desire to comfort her no little comfort. Perhaps that’s one reason we have children: to project our fears onto those we can console. What an awful midnight thought.

::: diary archive :::