Sing Me To Sleep

Someone sing me to sleep.

I’ve tossed and turned since trying for lights out at 10pm, and I just can’t. They halved my dose of lorazepam last night, and I’m wishing they hadn’t. I could get the nurse and ask for more but then I’d sleep all morning, and I don’t want that, either. So I’m stuck in limbo somewhere between being half and completely dead at the moment.

I swear that sanity lives in that little part of your brain that allows you to rest. Like a fat little hobbit – you either have one living there that is lazy as fuck and you don’t even know they’re there, or one that likes to stomp around with hard soled shoes at all hours of the night in the second floor apartment above your room, dropping shit and banging pots and pans, replaying all the old home movies from your childhood at the loudest their surround sound system allows.

Pretty sure the latter kind lives in mine.

And, he shacked up there so long ago I don’t even know when he moved in. He just sort of showed up like a squatter and has never left.

Sleep is something I am so jealous of. And, I’m not a jealous person. Things and stuff, I can take it or leave it. But those priceless things – like sleep and the clarity of mind it allows upon waking – that I am jealous of.

I haven’t known it in years. I’d have to go back to grade school to remember when sleep just came unquestioned, like the law of gravity or breathing air. Never having to be thought about, but always, reliably there. Those pubescent years when your body is stronger than your mind, and it silences your thoughts so you can grow.

But no. 

Sleep has become a crossword puzzle. Riddles and backwards questions, stacked up in empty boxes needing answers before I can turn the page and shut my eyes. But all the answers are never there, so I’m just stuck here wondering things like ‘what’s 8400 letters and starts with B.’ And every possibility runs through my head until morning comes with its bags packed full of bricks and regrets, ready to let me drag them around all day.

In the few minutes of sleep I think I actually got tonight, at least the nightmares didn’t creep in. They usually do – in that surreal moment of drifting somewhere between “it’s happening” and “I’m out” – that weird ether where you’re neither here nor there, like a door slowly shutting, the nightmares dart like mice into your mind and start building filthy little nests for you to have to clean up the next morning, piecing them apart and wondering where the hell they came from.

At least I’m just exhausted, which is a step up from exhausted and disturbed.

I need to stop expecting things. I was expecting to sleep last night, just like the last two nights, medicated but blissful. That stupid asshole of a hobbit that lives upstairs with his wooden clogs danced around again, cataloguing all the new questions and ideas from yesterday, like a drunken librarian tripping over books and theories and falling on his face over and over, only to keep me awake from his endless racket.

I’m tired. 

On top of being confused and lonely, I’m disappointed to be here again – 3am, wide awake, with nothing but words to keep me company. Unclear thoughts and jumbled sentences, knocking at my brain and wanting to crawl out my fingers, falling into place on the white space of a computer screen. When I write, I’m usually unsure of where it’s going or what I’m saying, until 3 or 4 final words drop themselves in italics, a door slams, and that angry little hobbit goes back to his room.

What a fucking asshole.