Insomniac

Close your eyes. Start to slow your breathing. Feel it travel deep in your belly. Feel your stomach rise and fall. Let it travel to your ribs now. Feel them rise. Feel them fall. Feel your body sink into the bed. Feel the support the bed gives you. Let’s do a full body scan.

I twitch, roll over. Forget my body then remember it.

Let’s start with our left toe.

I have a left toe? It seemed I’d never noticed before.

What does it feel like?

What does a left toe feel like?

Is it tingling? Pulsing?

Yes, tingling, I bet.

Is it numb?

Maybe that’s it.

Let’s move up now…

My hair. I’m sure I can feel my hair.

“No, I left at two. It was dead. The Uber just took forever.”

Two? I had resisted the urge, letting the meditation play over and over rather than risk glancing at the phone. Catching the time, counting the hours. And while it hasn’t brought me to rest, the yoga-heavy voice had given my fatigue a sort of rhythm. A beat to return to each time I caught myself drifting off, rest flitting away like a startled alley cat, so quick to pur when caught. If you could just catch it.

But the voice trailing down the hall, slurred and jarring, dragged me out of my slow to settle stupor. Giving me, in some way, a short lived relief. That not everyone else in the building had managed some rest. That not everyone else was slipping further into delicious nightmares and the sticky company of a wet dream. I reached for my phone, grappling through my bedside table’s mess of ear plugs, eye masks, and melatonin. The screen blared at me, bright against my bed’s blackout curtained gloom, even at the lowest light setting. 2:38 blinked at me accusingly.

How many hours have you wasted here? Listening to that hippie bitch?

It’s felt like more than 4 hours, hasn’t it?

You know an overpriced app doesn’t constitute company, right?

“Yeah, no, he was there. Asshole. He totally ignored me…”

Her voice trailed down the hall, disappearing with the beep of the elevator and its creek upwards. Follow your breath back down your body. Follow it deeper into your bed… I switched the yogi off and returned the phone to the night stand. Pulled the covers in tighter around me, tangling myself in my linen straight jacket, and then thrashed desperately against them. Listened to the radiator slow to silence, then kick on again.

I counted down from one hundred then back up, anxiety laden exhaustion pulling me out of each dip into deep breathing and my sunken mattress. I wondered how many minutes it took me to get from 60 to 30, and if it took the same going back up. How many minutes closer to my alarm it would take for me to slip past myself. Sneak into sleep uncaught. I had been so close to that sweet descension…

Then there was the elevator again. The screeching and ding. And the steps down the hall. Marching, heel to linoleum. Utter disregard for the floor’s sleeping neighbors. The drunk girl again? Then a nearly familiar voice and a knock:

“Hello?”

I pulled my covers up around my chin, vacuum sealing myself to the bed. The rapping grew heavier, quicker.

“Hello!”

Rapid and irate, the heel clicked rhythmically. Punctuating the pounding.

“Hellooo! I have your foo-”

I pulled the door open, revealing a scrawny woman, barely five feet in her menacing stilettos, glaring at me over feline sunglasses.

“What time is it?” I asked.

“Late. 3:40,” she answered, annoyed. Another hour lost. “Late enough I would like to get home. If my bike’s even still outside, that is.” I blinked at her, aspirationally sleep bleary and confused. “You know, if you want your food delivered to your door, you should answer the buzzer, or at least, you know, your door.”

“I don’t have a buzzer-” I stammered.

“I’ve been waiting twenty-five minutes,” she continued, pushing her glasses up the bridge of her nose. “And I would like to get home and get to sleep before the sun is out.”

“I don’t understand-” I started, reaching for the paper bag swinging from her ring worn, spindly hand. It seemed utterly out of place on her sleek, color devoid person. Monochromatic save a peak of pale, pinkish eye slipping into view and quickly out again, as she readjusted her glasses against the hallway’s fluorescent light. “I didn’t order any food.”

“Well,” she sighed, rolling her eyes. “Someone did.” Dropping the bag, she moved for the elevator.

I inspected the receipt. White Rabbit Chinese: one order of egg rolls, one crab rangoon, one orange chicken, no chopsticks. Apartment 73.

“This is for apartment 73,” I called after her.

“What?”

“It says right here. Apartment 73. I’m apartment 37.”

But she was already in the elevator, shrugging and checking her phone. “Did she hear me?” I asked myself out loud, looking to the bag still dangling from my frozen arm over the scratched hallway floor.

It swung in its own state of hypnosis, as a cockroach curled over its opening’s edge. Then another. And another. Startled, I dropped it, and the mob of them quickly scurried out, bursting around the hall. Too tired to differentiate between disgust and intrigue, I watched them scuttle away, disappearing past doors and mail slots, taking up residence among the bedridden, REM rich residents of the third floor.

One, apparently the chief among them, dashed for the elevator. The size of at least three of the rest. There was something almost charming in the iridescence of his back. And the dexterity with which he weaved and crawled. Dodging imagined stomps, ignoring the confines of walls. Each plane seemed to dissolve in front of him, as he rushed up a door, then down again, loading himself in the suddenly dinging elevator and disappearing in its unfortunate tiling. Slipping away beside a strewn aside and delicately cracked pair of catty sunglasses.

In spite of myself, I found my feet dragging me to the cast aside set, pulling me into the elevator. I picked them up, thinking to press “L” and rush to their owner. Chase down her bike and return them. Tell her she got the apartment wrong, ask her if she had seen the cockroaches too. But my hand merely hovered over the button, glasses in the other. Slowly, the elevator doors slid shut and, with a ding, I dragged the glasses over my eyes. We sat there for a moment, the cockroach, the glasses, and myself. Then we were barreling down and I was wondering when had I pressed the button.

But we didn’t get dropped at “L”. The doors didn’t creep open to reveal the desolate lobby, lonely in its perpetual fluorescent glare. Instead, the “B” button blinked at me impatiently, dinging suddenly as the doors peeled open. Yes, yes “B”. I must have pressed “B”!

There was that blinking overhead light, the stench of tomorrow’s trash, the gentle buzz of the washing machine down the hall (always in use). The only thing up at this hour besides myself. But then, the blinking was more of a flicker, wasn’t it? And the cockroaches, they were up too. Mine scuttled to join them, nesting in droves among the waste. And through its tacky stench… It wasn’t so much a buzz as a hum. A chant maybe, or a meditation.

Now feel your belly. Feel how deep it rises. How low it falls. Feel how soft it is. Not supple, not ripe. Just soft. Exposed. Worn and ready for the taking.

I followed the chant down the hall to the laundry room.

Feel how it could split open. Bring life, bring death. Feel how all its layers of fat and muscle could peel away.

My belly was rising. Full of egg rolls and missed periods. Then falling again.

Feel what is left. Feel the hollow of bone. Feel the eternity of rot.

It pulled gently in, pressing against my spine.

“She’s here.”

I turned into the laundry room. A ring of strangers sat in some perverse act of sacrificial worship. Among them was my neighbor. My Sunday school teacher. My middle school volleyball coach? And at their center: the skinny blonde, affirmation drenched lips and bloodshot eyes. The crowd turned to look at me, like I wasn’t the common denominator, but instead some unknown interloper. Each poising their own pink glare upon me, fatigue seeped into rotted irises and abandoned pupils.

Do you feel your belly?

Yes.

What does it feel like?

Claustrophobic. Abandoned.

Good. Let’s move up. Do you feel your neck?

Yes.

Your lips?

Yes.

Your eyes?

Yes.

What do they feel like?

Dry. Heavy.

Would you like to close them?

Yes.

Then close them.

Blonde, smiling eyes barreled into me, their doppelgangers’ still pleasantly fixed. A circle of cut apart familiarity. I returned the grin, so wide my eyes squinted shut. I breathed in deep (or was it a chuckle?), and felt myself slip off unnoticed. Into somewhere deep and pink.

The alley cat purred.