A Sleeplessness

At 4:30am, I'm having Swiss Miss Dark Hot chocolate mix in a mixing cup that I pour into my feeding tube. I taste most of what I eat, I know this stuff is good, it feels wonderfully hot in my stomach. This is my final attempt to sleep for the night before I'd normally get up anyway. Well, getting up won't happen, but you know what I mean.

This just happens sometimes, to all of us. Yesterday I took a nap in the afternoon--maybe that was enough sleep for a bit, and I didn't need my full night, or rather I couldn't get it. There are times when the mind has too much work to do, whether you like or know it, to take six or seven hours off. Recently I read an article in the NYT about the importance of a certain amount of sleep for the  brain to undergo a type of regular cleaning and maintenance, a sort of hormonal janitorial service. Now every time I fail to check in for cleaning, I figure I'm one step closer to janky brain.

Last night, this morning, the world was wet and cold in Indiana--late season snow was forecast, but didn't develop here. Just late season winter wet, early season cold spring--and this just after trees had blossomed, after I looked at the buds forming on the dogwood in the backyard. Luckily they are tough enough to take a bad night, rather like me.

I wrote of a night in San Francisco like this, one where I looked out into 3am fog, seeing only a smear of light from certain places on the overbuilt hill around me. In Bloomington, I looked outside to check for snow and saw long tracers of porch light and incidental street lighting on the asphalt, and from the kitchen, the light blue glow behind the clouds of what was supposedly a spectacular looking moon.

There's a part of me willing to blame feelings of anxiety, my keyed up energy, concern, or just plain lack of sleep on a full moon. Not even a small insignficant part--we're all part of the natural world, pegs in the order of things, so why shouldn't intensified gravity from the moon effect me--or affect me? I can well imagine this place a few hundred years ago, with the only light being the diffused glow of a covered moon, that light playing down on wet ferns under ash and beech and oak trees, bands of them, where my yard is now.

There was a time in my life where I virtually never failed at sleep. I could stay up until the wee hours, then boom! asleep. Wake at seven and go. For years, I went to bed at 10 so I could get up at 5, and be ready for when the gym opened. I still miss doing push ups and sit ups at 7am in the SRSC on campus, I miss that schedule, I miss that bagel I occasionally had afterwards.

Life has seasons, more and more varied than a typical year. I am late season cancer and early season cancer "survivor"--parentheses because I now know I'll never be rid of it, so what it is I'm surviving is the idea that it defeats me easily. That too is a cold, and occasionally wet transition, where the frost water of reality seems regularly to be thrown in my face. Try sleeping through that.

You or I could make the case that I'm always fighting a bit of fear when it comes to sleep. I worry about the fact that phelgm can stick in my throat and feel very choking, I worry that I won't breathe with diligence, I worry that I won't wake up. Some nights, I do something I have never done, not even as a child--I sleep with my lamp on. I do this because I reason that leaving the lamp on is my way of ensuring I'll get up because I have to turn it off. Of course that's bad logic, but you must let me have the fantasy I need to get this brain cleaned.

I do worry about myself, I worry about what's next, but usually that doesn't keep me up. I accept worry, concern, fuss, as part of a normal existence; I always have. My entire family would be hard pressed to name a single unfetteredly happy moment that we've had without secretly wondering when the other shoe would drop. That, I believe, is simply our Hoosier upbringing, a North East Indiana fatalism that is tied toward living close to the land, the destruction of crops willy-nilly in bad weather, the lack of wealth from harvests, the eternal grind of seasons into one another, with their bumpy often unpredictable transitions.

Me, this transition sometimes drives me crazy. It keeps me up. I cannot lie down for sleep in just any position anymore. I use more pillows, I take more time. My night is full of routines, for changing bandages on my neck, for cleaning the valve on my trach, for crushing the pill and feeding the lortab down the tube, waiting for it to relieve. I often have to do the old man middle of the night pee--not too hard to believe considering everything I eat is liquid, huh? I stumble out in my turkish towel bathrobe, trying very hard to keep the belt out of the toilet in my half-dazed state.

But some of it is so achingly beautiful you can't truly be told of it. You'd have to be here, and I never want you to be. I can say that moonlight was tempting me onto the porch, that yellow smear in the street was a brush stroke, the dark, and the light blue were colors I love to see together. The night has a way of creeping into the house and the house talks to me, the floorboards creak a bit, the limestone step sounds as if someone has stepped upon it. Even as I become tired I know that everything is alright because it is simply too interesting to ever leave.