A writing exercise.
It is 1.17am. Okay. It’s not yet official that I cannot sleep, but almost. There are a few choices here. I can turn back over and try to simply shut down like a tube TV, blinking out in a loss of static, but I’ve been doing that for the past hour and here I am. I can try to think about the exercises my therapist gave me last year, the breathing and the mind clearing. That was not a new lesson – I learned the same things in college during that terrible freshman year. It was the Lexapro that worked then as much as the meditation, but I don’t need that now. The problem is much larger and harder to correct than a chemical imbalance.
When I think of banishing my thoughts I think of slips of paper sailing into a void; there they go, sliding away from me. They came, and now they are going, and more will come in their place. I get a funny feeling when I do this, a tingling sensation in the middle of my forehead. Some mental holdover from when I meditated in high school, surrounded by dollar store candles while trying to open my Third Eye.
My sleep hygiene nowadays is terrible and when the meditation falls into re-imaging my bleak future I fight the urge to pick up my phone, let all that forbidden blue light flood the back of my skull, obliterate that pesky third eye. But I don’t.
I could take my pillows and retreat to the futon in the living room. I had the most horrific nightmare of my life in that room, on that futon, about a year and a half ago. A dark thing waiting for me in the corners, watching for me to wake. Trying to flee back to the bedroom and being caught. Waking up again on the futon, sensing the shadow, running back down the hall, being caught, waking up. Again and again on repeat until I finally surfaced to the sound of a bus hissing and beeping as it lowered itself to the sidewalk outside. Tears on my face.
But since then – nothing. I started sleeping there when M—–‘s allergies got bad and he began snoring into my right ear, blissfully and infuriatingly unaware of my palms pressed into my eye sockets. Nights when earplugs and headphones didn’t help. Sometimes reaching out and touching his arm or his chest will make it stop, but sometimes it wakes him up with startled jerks and he’ll let out worried grunts until I put my arm around him and he mumbles back to sleep.
I could also smoke. I am a lightweight for weed, which is fine because I don’t spend a lot of money on it. I bought an eighth about two years ago for a camping trip and just finished it last month. Now it’s been a few weeks of trying to figure out where to find more. I could get myself a medical card, head into any of the 50 or so shops that have popped up around the city and talk to a professional behind a counter about what will help me sleep, what will shut my brain off for an hour or two, what will calm my jangling nerves for a night. Maybe I have this high-minded opinion about white people and their gentrification of something that millions are in prison for, but mostly I cannot lie about pain I do not have for a condition that is not the reason I smoke weed.
Being high is always a guessing game, anyway. My worst experience was an edible I took on New Year’s 2017. I was at the bar when it hit me, and then in waves kept hitting me, like a storm I could not resist. I remember getting upset with a man who did not believe I knew enough about J.R.R.Tolkien so I left and stood outside in the freezing 8pm air to breathe, completely unable to tell time and knowing the world was ending. In retrospect, it was a bad time to get high. I was still raw from the realization that the world was always a much worse place than I had believed.
The street was deserted and I could see the top of lampposts and ice crystals and stars. I thought back to an evening in November – only two months before – when I had been sitting on the porch of a restaurant drinking beer and watching people across the street talk loudly with their friends. I had tried to form their image into a medallion for bad times, fully knowing the bad times were already here. I lost myself in the memory of laughing strangers until M—– found me out in the cold at the end of 2016. Only five minutes had passed but it felt like an hour, a whole lifetime of being lost in my terrible head. He walked me home, wrapped me in bed, ordered Chinese food, and we watched Star Trek until the fireworks woke me up at midnight.
Now I use it rarely – every other week maybe – and usually to sleep. The two year old weed, while stale and rough, made me drowsy from the slightest hit. This pungent new batch is different. I am not high right away, but in a couple of minutes my lips are buzzing pleasantly and the feel of the sheets is calm and cool. There’s a slight breeze from the fan and the open window where the cat crouches, swiveling his head to look at me, to look at the street, to look at the rats scurry from bush to bush, to look quietly back to me.
I like the feeling of this new weed. I am calm and everything is quiet, even my mind, but I am not sleepy. Now I reach for the blue screen and stare at pictures of cats for another half an hour. Most of what I look at online is cats. On Instagram I follow more than 10 different cats who live in beautiful, pristine places I’ll never live – hiking the mountains of Calgary, prowling the verdant woods of Norway. They are cute and inquisitive with their long, brushed fur, and large, shining eyes. I want to be one of those cats.
I scroll until the glare and the weird angle of my neck gives me a headache. I am hungry. I was hungry when I went to bed, but I am trying not to snack and so I don’t buy snack food. We have no chips or crackers or Goldfish. Not even ice cream. M—– is the one who buys ice cream, pints of Haagan Daas from the 7-11 or the Walgreens. He sticks them in the freezer when I am not looking and they appear like frozen treasures when I need them – coffee and chocolate and green tea. Smooth and cool and creamy.
There is no ice cream tonight. There is a block and a half of tasteless cheese and a loaf of sourdough slices. The fridge light is out – it’s always been out – so I press the button on the hood of the stove. The yellow bulb is preferable to the overhead fluorescent. It is warmer and lower and there is less chance someone outside will see me.
In all honestly though don’t care about the window. I say I don’t have a shade because the mint plant prefers the light – and that is true – but also I don’t think anyone really looks. I sit on my stoop sometimes with only a nightshirt, at midnight, at 1am, with M—–, drinking whatever hard liquor we have and playing Gordon Lightfoot songs I know he hates. I’m pretty sure whoever sees me doesn’t actually see me. We never actually see each other as anything more than just figures in the dark.
I pull out a piece of the bread and smear it with peanut butter. Folding the edges together I eat it standing splay-footed in the middle of the kitchen. The sourdough is tangy and rough, the wrong texture for a PB&J, but I like it. There is peanut butter on my face.
I go to the futon. It is a rich golden brown and held together with secondary hardware and wood glue. Every day it stays intact is a minor miracle. The mattress is thin, but springy, and I’ve come to like the firmness of it. I take it as evidence that I am getting old. I used to have a hard time sleeping in this room – even before the nightmare.
During the day its high bay windows holds my citrus trees, who soak up the slanting afternoon light. But at night it looks out onto the street and its yellowed lamplight, the red blinking eye of the traffic signal. If the wrong window is open every bus at the stop is a blaring of noisy whines and beeps. But over time my brain has made a pact with this dark room, an understanding that this is somehow the place I can turn off. Here I pull the curtains and turn my face to the wall, curling into myself, letting my back face all the horrors of light and sound and thought and, eventually, I am asleep.
Allison E. Fischbach 