It never feels 'white' – though that's what they call it (what Dorothy Parker called it, anyway).
I hate, hate, hate, sleepless or fragmentary or uncomfortable nights – that misery, especially at 4:40 am when you get up to go to the bathroom, hoping that when you get back to bed everything will change and you will pass into some sort of peaceful sleep.
Which doesn't happen. And you get pulled back and forth between almost asleep and uncomfortably awake, you change from the bed to the living room couch, you draw the curtains, you open a window for fresh air, you close it again as it gets too cold. You discover an amazing array of ways to move the duvet, your feet outside, feet inside, pajamas pulled off, one side, then roll to the other, and the infinite variety of locations that a pillow can have, none of them quite right – a huge matrix of changes to the space, none of which seem to land you in a space that actually works.
I guess it's worse because so many hours take place, moment by moment by moment, along an incoherent, complex and constantly changing boundary between sleeping and waking – I could barely keep my eyes open at 11 pm last night, went to bed early (for me anyway, in northern winters anyway), but for nothing good – I couldn't really rest, couldn't really sleep, couldn't really wake up. It's like a tiger cage of the mind, I can't stand it.
And I wonder, always analyzing, what the heck is going on: why, for about three or four weeks now, does my right eyelid tremble and twitch as though I'm tired, at odd and unexpected times of day? Why have too many nights this week, this month, been characterized by rolling back and forth, uncomfortable and not quite asleep, waiting to rest? Am I under pressure, under stress – that wouldn't make much sense, I am pushing myself to write these articles, but not more than I often have under a deadline; and my 'external' stresses (classes, meetings, events) are really not very heavy at the moment. Why am I showing so many physical signs of, well, cracking?
I can't make sense of it, perhaps because I normally show more emotional evidence of stress than physical evidence – I actually pride myself on a certain toughness, that although I may whine a lot and indulge my taste for personal tragedy, I still launch myself into the daily ephemera that needs to be done, even when I'm not feeling well. But I don't know what to do with these tics and strange nights – they suggest that I'm doing something very, very wrong....
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Incidentally, this blog has existed for about 193 days (counting by eye, so a number slightly subject to error) – I've made 153 posts, which is really awfully good for me – between five and six posts a week, nearly eighty per cent – practically a real, long-term, semi-commitment. As though I can finally settle down to something – okay, it's something ephemeral, fragmentary, unpublished – it's not the large operas I planned to write when I was twenty, nor the AIDS novel I hoped to survive to write when I was thirty. It's not even the academic books I've been pushing myself towards since I reached forty, nor the articles I have actually managed to write, am supposed to continue to write, am in fact required by profession and university pressure and government fiat to write.
But hey: it's words, it's out there – and best of all it exists, in the real (okay the virtual) world, beyond my imagination, outside of my head. Makes everything worth it, really....
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