A writing exercise.

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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.  

I wrote this three years ago. All of it is completely true.

–

In 1982 my parents bought a house in rural Carroll County, mid-Maryland, on a road that was home to cornfields and combines and cattle. It was a half-finished construction of concrete floors and wooden beams heated by a wood stove, nestled into a hillside that made it cool even in the fires of summer.

I grew up in this house and on the seven acres of pine and oak that it accompanied. My yard was a landscape of trees and grass, patches of wildflowers, a garden, a small orchard. In the summers you could not see another house through the trees, a towering line of woods that ringed the property.

I was never afraid in those woods, even at night. After dinner we would sit under the maples picking corn kernels from our teeth and I would catch fireflies in the dark. My ears knew the sounds of the crickets and cicadas and the rustle of wind through branches. My bare feet knew every hole and curve of the grass, the lay of the pine fields, the secret ways through their trunks. When I was small I would have sleepovers where we would roast marshmallows and tell stories about monsters in the trees. My friends would shriek with delight and fear, but I was never afraid. The trees were mine.

–

When I was ten my mom told me a story about their first summer in the house. It was hot and muggy and they had no A/C, so they slept in the “back room,” a windowless, musty concrete space adjacent to the living room – the door left open for the dogs to come and go. One night, after a thunderstorm that left the earth soft and cool, the dogs took off out of the room suddenly, stirring my mom from sleep. Then she heard the screeching.

It was wavering and high-pitched, a long, intermittent note. There was a rhythmic quality to it as it rent the night. It seemed as if the world was splitting in two. For two minuets she listened to it call, but she stayed in bed until the dogs came back. By then the noise had gone.

It shook her, but in the light of day it seemed far away, like a dream, and she didn’t think much of it until it happened again two weeks later.

All summer the noise came in the night, never at the same hour, never on any interval she could count. Sometimes, she thought, it may have happened and she never even woke. It became so commonplace that when she was up late working on grad papers it would happen and she would not notice until it had ended. The dogs no longer reacted.

I stared at her as she told me this story, and then laughed. “It was the train,” I said, stating the obvious. A CSX track cut through the woods and I had heard the rhythmic chugging of wheels and the whistle call my entire life. After rain, when the air was warm and humid, the wheels screamed as they rolled over the wet tracks. I had never remembered fearing the sound, it was as natural as any other.

“Yeah,” she said, her eyes a little glazed, “of course, it was the train.”

–

The autumn I turned 13 my dad was having me do yard work. He kept a patch of pumpkins and gourds along the west side of the property, near the tree line. It was a hot autumn and he had me haul a tractor-load of 5 gallon water buckets down the slope and pour them on the pine needles that cradled the roots of the plants.

It was past midday and balmy, at a point where the sun’s angle becomes unbearable, but the trees gave shade to the dried vines and my sweaty frame. I was dishing water out of the buckets with a bowl and spreading it to each plant when I heard the clicking.

My first impulse was that it was a bug, some kind of winged beetle or maybe a locust. It had a hard, wooden sound to it, like the woodblock percussion we used in elementary school. But under the clocking was something verbal. Something rhythmic.

It was unusual and not a sound I knew in the constant chorus of insects. I stopped and walked towards the treeline, trying to pinpoint the noise, trying to swallow the small bit of fear that began to bloom in my stomach. I could not see anything in the underbrush of devil’s tale and woodbine, but the sound became nearer. I strained my eyes for the bug; it sounded large, but sound is rarely and indication of size.

As I prodded in the tangle of weeds the clocking reached a crescendo, a staccato high note, and then I saw – something – move back in the brambly kudzu. I jumped and turned my head away in shock as a fat grasshopper took flight and buzzed at my head. I let out a scream and pawed my face. In a haze of adrenaline I dumped the rest of the bucket unceremoniously onto the vines and ran back up to the house, replaying the moment in my head, trying to tell myself it was a grasshopper. It was always a grasshopper.

–

The sky was a blanket over our house, wide and dark at night. New moons made the Milky Way shine, a glimmering trail from west to east, curving over the treetops and away into a sparking void.

Cool autumns and winters made for excellent nights of stargazing and my mother would wake me at two or three in the morning to watch meteor showers, bundled in blankets and slippers and hats pulled over our ears, the crisp notes of frost waking the hairs in my nose.

At about 17, I woke one morning to find my mother had not roused me to watch the cold starfall. It was deeply dark out and as I passed her room I saw she was still asleep, failing to wake even herself. I went into the night barefoot, relishing the air that woke me like something new and clean.

The sky was clear of moon, but bright with the amassed light of stars. They hoovered and twinkled in the cold sky, all the more vibrant for the lack of heat. I learned early in life that the best times for stargazing are cold nights, when there is no haze and no moon, when it seems as if there is nothing between you and the tumbling vastness.

I stood outside for awhile, catching a few gleams and glances from the corner of my eye, light sparks of meteors plummeting through the crystalline atmosphere. After about ten minuets of examining the western sky I saw something slowly coming over the trees from the horizon.

It moved too slowly to be a meteor and held a steady light, like an airplane from afar. There were no flashes of red and green, though – the constant of every aircraft in the night. The light was not close enough to make out a shape, but I was not frightened. I watched the light come up, thinking it was flying at cruising altitude somewhere in the stratosphere and would whisk over the house and on into its destination. As I widened my gaze to the sky again I saw another light, a bit brighter, perhaps nearer to me than the first, hurling itself from the east. Again, not fast, a steady pace, another aircraft in the night.

The two lights neared each other and their paths crossed. The light from the east headed on, but the light from the west did not.

I watched it stop moving, turning from airplane into distant star, and then make a tight curve in the sky. This was not a thing I had ever known an aircraft to do. To stop, to move so quickly, to turn itself around. It turned and followed the light from the east, picking up speed in pursuit. The two lights did not shoot away into the sky, but ran on steady to the west as I stood frozen to my bones by the sight. I stayed there until they were obscured by the treetops on the horizon, and then I went back inside.

–

I thawed under the flannel sheets of my bed, my head buried in my arms, a crescent shape of a human, fetal and numb, unable to understand the sight or why it upset me so much. It was just an airplane I could say to myself, over and over again, rational, calm, unafraid of the dark or the trees or the sky – but that would not make something less true. That I had probably not seen an airplane, or had not glimpsed a grasshopper, or had not heard a train. I felt safe in my home because of my unwavering ignorance and my appeals to reason, sound and sure, but what if maybe all along – my entire life running barefoot through dark trees – I had been wrong. Only a step away from something much worse than I had ever allowed myself to know.