Day
The night never troubled me. I don’t remember sleeping in my parents’ bed and, according to their recollection, I emigrated from my crib in their bedroom to my bed in my own room way before I had the size to look like the bed was indeed mine. I never understood my brother, who once, in his best sleepwalking form, lit his way down the stairs to mother’s room with a rechargeable lamp and held in his other hand a small effigy of the virgin mary, keeping ghouls at bay.
I had trouble sleeping from early on in my youth and I grew to love late night television from then on. I was all too familiar with Leno and Letterman before I was ten and Conan became a nightly presence pretty much until I graduated high school. The best, though, was the late night programming I once watched in Spain as a teen. It consisted of an assortment of women, one after the other, alone, undressing and masturbating nonchalantly in velvet draped rooms with checkerboard floors (I’ve mentioned this before). It was the first time I perceived nudity and sex as commonplace and even utterly boring. I remember eventually turning to reading ‘The Silence of the Lambs’ by Thomas Harris during those days, before I had had a chance to watch the film.
Sometimes I fretted. The first few times I saw the clock turn past four I remember waking my grandparents to inform them of my situation. My grandmother would decry how terrible it was for the child to be awake, unable to sleep, and she would fix me apple peel tea. It is a wonderful beverage, to be sure, but it didn’t knock me out. My grandfather would go chemical on me, and those definitely did the trick. Once my nightly wakefulness became habit, I’d have the tea and Valerian root pills, because I shouldn’t get too attached to pills, and at three in the morning the sleeping pills from my disheveled and half-asleep grandfather. Eventually, I learned I did very little for my narcolepsy by disturbing my elders’ sleep and I rode it out. I always feel asleep eventually, always before sunrise in my tweens.
My brother used to advice me to play a movie in my mind. At the time, I believe he was playing ‘Aladdin’ in his. I thought it an incredible act of prowess for him to be doing this every night. Alright, the cave, Jafar, the parrot…what happened next? The exactitude I attributed to my brother’s memory baffled me before I gave his strategy a fair chance to lull me to sleep.
Day was school and afternoon nap. I didn’t identify what was quite possibly narcolepsy until college. As I lay baking in the afternoon sun streaming through my mother’s window, I remember an unexplainable piercing pain befall my leg on many a times I entered a half asleep state before doing my homework. I’d also become paralyzed yet fully aware on mornings I did not want to leave my sheets and struggled to keep up a hazy consciousness. It was horrible, but I always gave sleeping in another try, hoping I’d actually shut down.
Night was an easy blanket. Living alone, I could be drunk, I could be high and no one was watching, or my friends kept my spirits up. The scope of my vision reduced to the artificially lit, the privately felt and the secretly kept. It was so quiet. The time to sleep seemed to be when there was too much to take in. Lions did it, I’d seen them on rocks on tv laying, allaying the strokes of the sun, and so many other creatures were also nocturnal, so why couldn’t I be one? Without hesitation I would give up the fresh zest of productivity for the creative depths hidden in the dark.
But I was mostly just afraid, like most monsters are, of the overwhelming presence of the light. I did not want to bow nor pay my respects to glory and awe if I could slither past and last under the more permissive moonlight. I sought to escape questioning and answering in full view why is it that we burn? I was a murmur, and happy to be so until I knew I’d never conquer without putting up a fight for the day.
The morning is my challenge, not the night. I need the heat to forge my soul, when all I had done was billow up smoke. I love the moon like my only companion, like the only soulmate I have known, even though I never caught her whole. Fitter and bronze skinned from the sun, I will woo her soon and earn my lover’s blue vision so I can stride the land proudly, in balance and limping never more.
