The worst part of not being able to sleep is being awake. The wide-eyedness of it. The painstaking sluggishness of the minutes dripping away like an IV. Time moves too slowly, until it doesn’t. As the hours mount and the morning approaches, the frustration of not feeling tired at all melts into the anxiety of knowing that you’ll be drowsy for the rest of the next day. In those moments, nothing seems more desirable than slipping away into slumber, that fast-track where time literally flies by in the blink of an eye.
I know this struggle well. Despite the fact that sleep is one of the few things that all animals do, I can be terrible at it. For one, I can’t do it in vehicles of any kind. A 16 hour flight means I’ll be watching 8 movies. When I land, jetlag will course through my body pretty much until I’m ready to go home. Also, I can’t sleep if there’s any kind of constant or repetitive noise. Or light, at all. I need to be lying horizontally, with comfortable clothes, my face washed and teeth brushed. The pillow also can’t be too hard, or too soft. And the sheets can’t smell funny. “
Adriel, you fucking diva! said Goldilocks.
I envy you who are able to fall asleep anywhere. You who I think I’m having a conversation with while driving, only to learn that you knocked out during the FIVE MINUTE COMMUTE TO TRADER JOES. My neighbors on the plane who are snoring even before takeoff, who are able to somehow turn off their brains and bladders for two continents. Lovely’s entire family has a gene that actually helps them sleep better with all the lights turned on, the TV blasting commercials, all while sitting upright or sprawled over two chairs and a coffee table. These people and their magic baffle me, as do my friends who crash on my couch and when I ask if they need to use the bathroom before going to sleep respond nonchalantly, “Nah I’m good man.” What do you mean you’re good???? Don’t you need to take a hot bath, change into organic cotton pajamas and mist your face with lavender essence??? Or at least pee?
I’ve always been this way. My childhood memories are still filled with the trauma of naptime – the dreaded moment in the middle of the afternoon, when the sun and my adrenaline are at a peak, and my mom forced me to lie on her lap, facing away from the television while she watched A Different World. What could be crueler than being demanded daily to keep my eyes closed while Lisa Bonet cooed in the background? In preschool, naptime was a mass-production, with cots lined across the school floor like a World War I ward. I actually, miraculously managed to fall asleep on my first day of this experience, but was rudely awakened by a classmate shaking me awake, “NAPTIME OVER!!!!” she shrieked, snot oozing out her nostrils. I never napped successfully again. I’d whisper at my friends with the assumed invisibility that all people that age have in moments of amateur secrecy, and when the teachers caught me they dragged me by the arms to room flooded with light, where a lone cot was placed against the wall under the pencil sharpener. That was the year I learned to love the taste of pine and graphite.
Ironically, I got my best sleep when I was living in New York. Without a job to guilt me into waking up before 11, I was able to camouflage my insomnia with Netflix binging until my eyelids became like sandpaper and closing my laptop was like a personal off-switch. There’s something sadistic about relishing in falling asleep to that kind of exhaustion, when sprawling out feels so luxurious and your muscles twitch from fatigue. Maybe that’s why I love sleep so much. It’s a sense of accomplishment that I’ll never be able to explain to those who have the privilege of instant access. It makes each morning that I wake up refreshed feel like a triumph. A celebration worth anticipating every single day.