An Autopsy of a Sleepless Night

Field notes, compiled in the dark, by someone who should be asleep.

A guide needs a preface, so: this one was written under duress, phone brightness turned down to the exact level that says I’m not doing anything; I’m simply checking the time, at 2:14, and then at 2:25, and then at 2:46, and then, finally, a version floats into production at the end of the third waking hour. But it doesn’t count, because you never actually saw the numbers on the clocks. You just felt the shapes of them bend around the timeless euphoria that comes with lack of sleep.

Time of Death. Somewhere between 2 and 3 a.m.

Primary Cause. The brain. Remembering the various points in my life where I could have said something better. Done better. Been better. Better. Better. Better.

Not the useless void I seem to think myself into these days.

If I could poke it with a stick, I think I would. Shove something sharp in to spark creativity, or even just to think outside of movie quotes and songs.

Secondary Cause. The body. It’s too hot. Too cold. The pillow hurts. The blanket is stuck under the dog. My foot is exposed, and now it’s prime real estate for the monsters under the bed. Move. Roll. Shift. What was once comfortable now hurts. Then the flutter of my heart. A thick thrum in my ears announces my anxious state as I try to calm myself down.

Specimen: One cold foot. One hot leg. Both on different limbs.

Environmental Evidence. The walls shift as they settle into the Earth, now cooling as the colder months approach. A car alarm sounds off in the distance. The white noise of my daughter’s sound machine blares through the monitor. The dog is snoring.

The Phone: EXHIBIT A. I can lie and say I just want to check the time. I just want to check the notifications across my phone. The need to clear everything. The need to respond. To connect. Scroll. Hit like. Look at the time and calculate how many hours of sleep I would get if I shut my eyes now. Six? Four? Three? A countdown. Put the phone down. Pick it back up 34 minutes later when I still can’t fall asleep.

Update: I did not sleep.

The Bargaining. “I can still get three hours if I sleep now” becomes two, then twenty minutes. Twenty minutes is enough, right? I can nap in the afternoon if I need to. The lie. I can’t nap. Unless I’m sick. My body won’t let me. It just drags on, dazed and tired. I can still function with no sleep. Filling the void until I can pick up my daughter from school, and then I can feel whole again. I should look into that.

Hallucination of Productivity. The sudden need to reorganize my entire life. Scroll YouTube for ways to make Notion productive for me. For my family. For my fucked-up head. Open up Notes. Add to a checklist I’ll never go back to again. Start a new document. Write that revolutionary idea at 3:11 a.m. Solve world hunger. Find the meaning of life and tell no one.

Anomaly: I have solved my entire life at 3:15 a.m.

The Euphoria. The strange in-between where fighting for sleep and sleeping stop feeling like necessary things. The boundaries between terrible ideas and genius become nonexistent. I have slipped through the cracks of time and am simply existing in my own dimension.

Laughing in my head as I think up plots for stories I’ll never tell. Like how, between my two dogs, I have one perfect dog— Sit and stay, perfect nail trims, no barking, catches food when tossed. Instead, I have two. Two that are flawed and loud and keep lying on my blanket so I can’t move. Bolt’s nose is pressed to my ear. Breathing. His Nose. Faces…

If our faces were somehow rearranged, would I still remember my husband’s?

Noses are important structures. My husband hates his nose, but I love it because mine fits perfectly under his, like puzzle pieces when we kiss. He moves over and snores softly beside me.

Hearing my daughter’s voice call out before realizing it’s in my own head. Struggling to hear her once more.

What would she sound like when she is ten? I forget her voice when she was two. How choppy her sentence structure was. Calling me “Boppy” instead of “Mommy”. The softness in her voice when she called. Like every time she called was a question.

Now a statement. She asks. “Can you find the orange shirt today?”

“Mom?”

“Mom?”

I’d say, “Coming,” and I mean it every time. Because I still want to hear her voice once more. Always once more.

The Things You Think About When No One Is Watching. The people I haven’t spoken to in years. The longing to reach out and see how they are. Missing them. Conversations I wish had gone differently. Wanting to take back words that hurt people. The fights between family. I didn’t mean it when I said that. The moments when I should have acted and didn’t. The struggles I had between the few that I love deeply. Wishing to see the few people who have passed. My real mother. My grandma and grandpa. My uncles. My father-in-law. Beautiful people who were cut away too soon. While people like her are still around.

Her. It always comes back to her. She took up so much of my life and even now still holds weight over me. Pressing me into the bed. Pulling me from slumber. I want to hate her.

The worry about how I act online and how I am in real life. The blurry lines that sometimes fall between the two worlds. Feeling like I will never be good enough for anything. Realizing that people just pretend to enjoy me while they pass me by for others. The loss. So much loss. The abandonment issues. The trust issues. The issues upon issues now flooding through me at 3:42 in the morning.

Finding: I am apparently capable of remembering every embarrassing thing I’ve ever done in the wee hours.

The False Dawn. Light breaks over the horizon. Birds start. The sky changes from black to light. Realizing I spent the whole night in my head once more with nothing but empty thoughts and stupid plans of action, and no drive to accomplish anything today. If I had fallen asleep at the start, I could have gotten seven whole hours of sleep. Now, it’s barely 15 minutes before my alarm sounds.

The Alarm. This feels personal now. My body and mind are against me. Now I have to make it through the day trying to be something I no longer know how to fake.