My Lack of Sleep
written by: Ken Tomaro
11pm and I awake for no reason. I roll over on my right side, staring at the ghosts dancing across the wall. In a dreamlike stupor, my brain tells me this is wrong. Half-asleep, almost brain-dead, my body instinctively rolls over on my left side before melting into the soft mattress, and I quickly fall back to sleep. 1am and I am awake again, and once more at 5am. I know it is 5am by where the shadow of the street light in the alley glides along the wall of my bedroom. It is a restless world at the moment, and something or someone doesn’t want me to sleep.
At midnight, I awaken not to the normal bumps in the night but to a jolt through my whole body; an imaginary prison guard angrily waking me for roll call. Confusion briefly washes over me along with the erratic beating of my heart against chest wall. For no other reason than the cruelty of it, they wake me unfailingly at 3am and again at 4:15. I haven’t the energy to fight back, nor is it a fight I can win, so I take the abuse that comes and find sleep when I can. The shadow of the window blinds creates an image of prison bars as I drift off.
My mind is a bored teenager in constant need of attention. At 2am, it wakes me up as if to say, “C’mon, let’s do something!” I brush it off and promptly fall back to sleep. Still bored, it wakes me at 3:30 and again at 5:45. “Your boredom isn’t my fucking problem! I’m trying to sleep!” I scold. If you know anything about teenagers, it is that they are incessant in their boredom, relentless. I fall asleep with one eye open and irritated, waking up seconds later to the sound of my alarm.
I wake up choking on my own breath. It is 4am, and there is a slight pulsating, almost goose-bump-ish feeling running like a current through my body. It has the same intensity as an airplane pushing down the runway just before takeoff. It is an ominous feeling, slightly uneasy. The familiar feeling of anxiety. I am somewhere between the dream world and the real world, and wonder to myself what I should feel anxious about when seconds before my mind and body were dead asleep.
In the midst of my anxiety, I raise one leg in the air and shake it violently for a brief moment before doing the same with the other leg. I pull my arm from under the covers and do the same, followed by the other arm. My body again instinctively takes over, and I shake through the head and neck, then my torso, hips, etc. To anyone who might witness this, it looks rather foolish, but I was told this is what animals do after trauma as a natural way to release stress and tension. We are all animals and do what we have to, to shake things off.
Common lore tells us that spirits come out around 3am. Sometimes called the witching hour. It is this other-worldly time in the early hours when the veil between the living and the spirit world is thought to be thinnest. A loved one comes to us with a gentle tap. Another spirit wakes you, causing you to remember where you left your car keys. And yet another wakes you for no other reason than to be facetious. At most, they are mildly irritating yet harmless.
But these are not just any spirits. These are the demons I sleep with nightly. The four horsemen of my apocalypse. The quiet hours for most are nothing to me but a constant battle between my mind and my self. It is a war I cannot win.
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