Originally posted 06.16.2005

Perhaps it’s the calm before the storm. I’ll start a job soon, and will have a regular schedule for the first time in years, and I’m a little worried about how I’ll adjust. The last couple of nights I’ve spent eight hours under, solid, waking in sheets so undisturbed I barely need to make my bed up. What’s more, mid-morning, the bed draws me back for a nap and all the coffee in the world won’t set me upright until I’ve given in.

So here I am, at 9:30, wake-up time for a lot of people, but four hours into the day for me, stuffing my ears with foam, pulling down my cheap eyeshade, and returning to the field of restoration that dominates my room. For someone who doesn’t spend much time in nature, I’m ruled by the seasons, sleeping longer and deeper in the winter, short and light in the summer. Lately sleep has been unusually precarious: I’m like prey, one ear open for the rustle that will mean my end, I wake all through the night with my heart racing, and break from the sheets even before dawn shows murky through my window sheers.

What I’ve got, if I may be permitted to indulge in self-diagnoses and made-up conditions, is juvenile onset periodic insomnia. Perhaps I developed it, during my daddy’s girl years, in emulation of my old man. But while he battled his with half-marathons and vodka, I courted the slithery sleepless hours, using them to indulge in additional reading sessions, propped up by the extra pillows I dragged out of the linen closet. I liked the new word and adult complaint, and the lost hours didn’t have much effect on my daylight world. Besides, it made me more like dad: I don’t sleep either.

As I got older, it lost its romance. Those sharp, early morning hours are useless after a while, as the string of three or four-hour nights, sometimes weeks of them, leave me too drained to snap my fingers. It’s unwise to run in Brooklyn (or anywhere else, really) at 4 a.m. Rude to practice fiddling or make phone calls. The under-rested brain that hungrily devoured novels when I was 10 can’t focus on the printed page at 36, so work is out of the question. The one task I have left, based on a suggestion my mother made a quarter of a century ago (and I thought she was just being self-serving), has its own timeline and periodic recouping: after four weeks of restless nights, there is nothing left to clean.

I sleep better when I’m not alone. “You didn’t move, not an inch,” said the last man who let me stay the night in borrowed pajamas. This despite the martini and two glasses of wine: a recipe for wakefulness more potent than the blackest coffee: whatever sedating effects the alcohol has are trumped 10-fold by the crest in blood sugar hours later, the closest thing I experience to mania.

The man I lived with for two years accused me of engaging in our serious relationship merely to alleviate my sleeplessness. It was envy, I think, that drove him to belittle my love; sleep approached him with utmost caution. “Your head hits the pillow and you’re out. I’ve never seen anything like it,” he chided. Meanwhile, he stayed up until 4 a.m. watching TV, playing computer games. But he still got eight hours to my five or six, sleeping until noon. It was a little unfair. He ran little risk of waking me with the bustle of his somnambulant activities, but I walked gingerly on eggshells, wincing at every crackle, during the 5 to 9 shift (after which I figured, the rest of the world is up, if he can’t sleep through the buzz of the coffee grinder, to hell with it).

Now I find myself living with another nighthawk. This one doesn’t share my bed, but she does share exposure to the summer racket that careens down Flatbush, the roar of the rooftop air conditioners on neighboring buildings, as our bedrooms share the same outside wall with the kitchen between us. Worse, while my bed is as far as I can get from the window, hers is directly under. Yet she sleeps through the morning light and racket, and not even the ringing phone, which to me is no less alarming than a shotgun blast, will make her stir. So I worry less about rousing her, but I’m starting to understand that envy.