After a terribly fitful night of sleep last week, I woke up to the following saved in the Notes app of my phone:
I’m a terrible sleeper, or at least I have been since around heading off to college. I wake and doze in weird cycles, up and about randomly through the night. I don’t know why it is…my apartment is cool, dark, and quiet, and there’s something to be said for sleeping alone.
It’s liberating and lonely to sleep alone, to reach out to the other side of the bed and feel nothing there but cool, crisp sheets, the other pillow vacant and waiting to be cuddled in lieu of a body that isn’t there. Without another person to worry about, I’ve grown increasingly inconsiderate at night. I’ll wake up spread across the bed like DaVinci’s Vitruvian man, rendered three-dimensional at three in the morning. I claim my space with every toe and finger, mimicking a starfish, a compass rose, finally at the point where my subconscious doesn’t keep me adhered to the left side of the bed to keep from disturbing another.
I sleep violently, almost aggressively active in my oblivion. Every night before bed the sheets are tucked under the mattress, with perfect hospital corners and the quilt centered exactly right. I wake up in a tangle, the quilt and sheets pulled entirely over my head with a perfect window around my face. Like some kind of a broken marionette, my feet have twisted into pockets of blankets and my hands are crushed into the nest of pillows I create without ever knowing I do it. The word “akimbo” couldn’t apply more accurately to whatever unconscious ballet I conduct, pirouetting and thrashing through dreams.
I even converse with my dreams, to the point where I’ve woken myself and others mid-conversation well past midnight. I suppose it’s endemic to a mind that never really rests entirely, and sometimes I think it would be so nice to be able to make everything go quiet in the stupor of sleep. Other times I think it’s nice that even in the silence and solitude of my apartment after dark, I still find a way to chat.
And so with a post that's as disjointed and rambling as my nights of sleep in general, goodnight, goodnight, a thousand times goodnight, friends. And if you have tips on how to become a better sleeper...send'em my way.