On Sleeplessness
On a Monday night in June, in the early hours of the morning, I lay in bed sweating, listening to my window fan that was so overworked the fan blades looked poised to jettison out of the window onto the street below. This night was like any other, except the day’s machinations were historic. The Supreme Court issued decision after decision overturning half a century of precedent, and the administration was well into the process of collapsing.
Often, in bed like this, thinking about every problem in the world, as well as some of my own, going to the bathroom an endless number of times, and wondering if I would ever get some sleep, I’ve passed many evenings and just as many mornings.
These nights of sleeplessness started at an early age and often caused me a great deal of distress. Looking back, I couldn’t tell you what kept me up, as my life has changed many times over the years, not always for the worse, but even when life is great and I have no complaints, these unpredictable nights of restlessness still come without warning.
I have approached the problem with the usual menagerie of drugs, alcohol, excessive exercise, hot showers, cold showers, and some other approaches. Each of these has worked at least once, but never more than occasionally, and only for a time.
On the worst nights, I often find myself in the kitchen, hunched over cheese, feverishly eating an entire block of cheddar or a triangle of parmesan, or even worse, worked up over not being able to sleep, my thoughts turn to love, and to my terrible luck.
This particular night, I had traversed the long road through the various creature comforts, the cheese, and all my thoughts about everything. Usually, this is when I throw in the towel, and sure enough, out of frustration, I finally put on my pants and left.
I walked down the five flights of stairs, through the corridor of steps lined with dust and heat. On the street, I found my first relief of the night. There was nobody out, and the air was far cooler than inside.
The corner store is a beacon on these late nights, of which I have had many in New York City over the last twelve years. The store’s windows were blinking with glowing advertisements, and the white light from inside cast the nearby buildings in relief as though it were day.
Even though the hour was now approaching four, a few punk rockers and graveyard shift workers stood about, waiting for chopped cheeses, halal chicken over rice, and bacon, egg, and cheeses. I put in my order, an egg and cheese on a roll, lettuce, tomato, salt, pepper, and ketchup, then walked to the front and leaned against a tower of La Croix boxes.
Ahmed, who has worked there since before I moved here many years ago, sat behind the counter on his phone watching videos.
“Busy, huh?” I asked.
“Always.”
“That’s good.”
“Hot night,” he said.
“Yeah, I can’t sleep.”
“Again?”
“Always.”
A man came in off the street asking for change. Ahmed barely looked up, and only said, “Not in here, bro.”
“Ten . . .”
“Not in here, man.”
“Do you have five dollars. Five?”
Ahmed stood, and the man turned without speaking and walked back out onto the street, and Ahmed sat back down and said to himself, “I don’t get paid enough.”
We had lost the train of thought after that and soon I was back out on the street with my sandwich and a pack of cigarettes in the bag. After I made it to the roof of my building, I sat eating my sandwich, looking out over the skyscrapers and neighborhoods, as I have done many times, straining my neck to look up at the constellations and smoking until my throat hurt. For the first time all day, in the crosswinds on my roof, the air sent goosebumps over my neck.
They say that New York City is the city that never sleeps, but in these hours, the towers go dark, and the skies above the city are quiet at last, save for a few white lines above, left by the blinking airliners speeding past the Big Dipper and the Summer Triangle.
On nights like these, my thoughts turn to the decision-makers sitting over the chessboard of humanity, then inevitably to the genocide in Palestine, as they have constantly over the last nine months, and about the unlikeliness at this stage of any decisive action by any nation to stop the killing, and all of this triggered in me an awareness of the brutish and ruthless logic of empires, more terrifying than even the worst nights of insomnia.
I remind myself in these moments: being alive doesn’t make any of us wiser or more experienced than the long dead generations before us. Many have come and gone, particularly with revolutionary ideals. But even the Jacobin set settles well into the life of statesmanship, just as many are not so lucky, chasing revolution and dreams into poverty and oblivion.
Every archetype is reproduced by the ages, especially the insomniac, as he sits here, writing these words. Perhaps only the stakes grow higher as history and time progresses.
I thought of the dark rooms housing the Black Paintings at El Prado, and Tres De Mayo. The fear in the eyes of the insurrectionists standing before the firing squad is as real as fear can be upon the canvas, and the look in their eyes reminds me of the fear I have seen in the eyes of so many children in Gaza living under constant bombardment.
Who will be the Goya of our age? Who will take these atrocities, papered with endless propaganda, and immortalize their truth for the ages? Who will explain the course of events to future generations so that truth is not lost in time? Someone will, but whether the materials of their ideas will survive time, is more uncertain.
After many years, the anxiety I feel during sleepless nights has subsided, and the predicament has evolved from one of anxiousness to one of mere annoyance. Perhaps my years of apprenticeship in insomnia are over, for now I almost always stay up until the arrival of that sound, once so cursed but now so welcome, of the birds chirping, and after my mind has grown weary with the hours, I can often make out what the birds are talking about. That morning, the pigeons were enthusiastically discussing last night’s Yankees game.
As the first light of the morning drifted in with the conversations of the birds, my mind was a swirl of unanswered questions about the world and myself. I lay down, closing my eyes out of exhaustion, and soon I fell into the inky blackness of the mind, on an island deep within myself, far from everything, even world events and love.
It was long after night was over, but far before morning, a period that very well could have been a dream. The general proposition, which I believe is supported by the scientific literature, is that during these hours not a single soul is awake on the entire planet, which is why so many strange things happen: the air is charged with potential, stored up for tomorrow, and one is bound to encounter large thoughts about nations, and birds with their pleasant conversations.
The morning after, I usually spill an entire bag of coffee beans on the floor or drop a fried egg on my foot, but by midday, I grow so numb from the discomforts of restlessness that I can mostly be said to be awake. Tiredness is never far, though, and a dryness about the eyes throughout the day is a reminder that rest will come.
If this was a respectable non-fiction essay, I might detour into philosophical and scientific theories on sleep, or quote Shakespeare, or expound on arcane histories of insomnia, but I’m just a guy trying to get some shut eye.