Boomerang

    There comes a point at which being tired boomerangs and turns into insomnia. I’m so familiar with this experience that it’s come to be an expected part of my night, something I think about as I face my bed: when will I find myself lying there, awake, unable to cross the barrier between that condition and tiredness? Because it’s coming. It’s always coming

    Imagine, if you will, the way you feel when you’re ready for bed. You’re in your living room, sitting on the couch, and you become aware that your eyelids are heavy. Maybe your head almost hurts, though not quite. Whatever you were doing to keep yourself entertained is starting to annoy you instead. It feels as though you could just click off the light and be asleep before you were even prostrate.

    I get that. Every night there comes a point at which I feel that. So I get up, and I go into the bedroom — this is a trick, by the way, which I had to be taught; for years I was an inveterate couch-sleeper, the sort of person who could be found waking up at sunrise in whatever room he had been in at midnight the night before, regardless of its purpose. Anyhoozy, I get into the bedrrom and I peel off my clothes and I lie down on the bed. And the tiredness begins to leak away. I’m not usually aware of it at first, though I am wondering when I’m going to realize it has happened. Then, after half an hour, or an hour, or however long, I realize that I’m just lying in my bed, staring at the ceiling, and that physical sensation of sleepiness, the one that drove me into the bedroom in the first place, is gone.

    I try to read in these moments, but the funny thing is that I actually am tired enough that it’s hard to concentrate on things. Usually I default to an audiobook, probably one I’ve heard a half-dozen times before: A Short History of Nearly Everything, for instance, or The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. There is a list of voices — nearly all male (almost all audibook readers are male, for reasons that could probably be fruitfully explored but which I’m not going to write about now) — that have slowly lulled me to sleep almost every night of my life. Bill Bryson, Martin Freeman, Stephen Fry, Simon Prebble: the men who read the books I try to sleep to.

    Sometimes it works. Sometimes I lie there with an audiobook burbling in my ear and I drift off and wake up five hours later and three hundred pages further on in the story. But often as not I lie there and think bad thoughts. I worry, or I self-criticize. I squeeze the extra fat around my midsection. I get up to pee a lot. I feel guilty about how I’m not reading. I read, but I absorb nothing. I become paranoid that the cat’s stuck outside. Increasingly, I worry about death. Mine, other people’s, it doesn’t really matter.

    I don’t have a very good perspective on death. I know I’m not going to heaven or hell or anything like that. I’m just going  to blink out of existence and cease to be and I won’t know the difference. But what the hell does that mean? And how can it be that that’s going to happen, and happen so soon, when I can’t even make myself go to sleep when I’m tired? Maybe insomnia is a form of death-denial. Maybe it’s my subconscious trying to get me to live forever.

    I so often wish I could just put a halt to the passage of time, so that I could stop worrying about how quickly and constantly it’s going by, and about how everybody I know is going to die and then I’m going to die and by the time that’s happening it will seem as though no time has passed at all. And sometimes, when I’m wishing that, I get up in the middle of the night, and write it down.

    Am I going to be able to sleep now? Will the boomerang whip back around towards me? Or have I just got myself pointlessly worked up again? We’ll find out.

    Good night, I hope.