Wednesday, August 1, 2007

I couldn't sleep at all last night

But I wasn’t thinking about Almond Delight. Remember that commercial? The dude was so amped about his breakfast cereal that he couldn’t get any shut-eye, and now he's dancing around the kitchen in his robe because it's finally morning? Why didn’t he just pour himself a bowl the night before and go to bed?

I had my bowl of cereal and still couldn't fall asleep until 3am, so I know it wasn't the excitement of breakfast keeping me awake. It’s been this way for a few weeks now. I’ve had brief bouts of insomnia over the years, but this is the worst ever. No matter how tired I am, I just get more and more wound up as the evening progresses. By bedtime, I'm bleary-eyed but completely alert.

And though I'm an anxious person in general, I don't really feel like I'm not falling asleep because of anxiety. It's more like now that I'm wide awake, what little nettlesome worries can I tap into in order to occupy my brain?

It would be one thing if, once I realized there was no hope of drifting off anytime soon and rose from the bed, I spent the hours banging away at the keyboard working on the novel that I started before Lilah was born and may or may not ever get back to. But I’m not doing anything remotely like that. Mostly, I’m reading celebrity gossip blogs (there, I admitted it) and Googling random people from my past, including girls I knew at summer camp 30 years ago. (Thirty years ago, holy shit, did I just say that? Did I mean it? Did I accidentally add an extra decade?)

And then, when I finally do fall asleep, I’m just rolling and thrashing and flipping myself from one side to the other, totally unable to settle in, like, Who came along and replaced my comfortable futon with barbed wire? But the thing is, when I open my eyes, the futon is still right there underneath me.

Now that right there is some seriously f’ed up shit.

1 comment:

BOSSY said...

Bossy hasn't slept a decent amount of years in a row in hours. Er, she means: A decent amount of hours in a row in years.