Life in My Years

Nighttime is the loneliest time.

My ears catch the sound of soft footsteps outside and my right arm quickly snaps to the lamp switch that’s within convenient proximity. With my hand still resting on the switch, I sit cross-legged on my bed in the sudden darkness, frozen. Finally after a few seconds, I hear that sound I’ve been waiting for: the soft clicking of another lamp switch in the living room and the sound of approaching footsteps that walk past my locked door and into the room where my dad is snoring. There is the soft swish and squeak of a bedroom door being closed and I relax. My nighttime has begun.

I can’t fall asleep. But then, it’s not really that, though it may feel like it — it’s that I won’t. I’ve always had trouble getting myself to sleep at night, even as a little kid. Bedtimes were a dark, unspeakable enemy that waited for me in my big, dark room and I clung pitifully to the familiar, lit world with a dedication and resourcefulness worthy of my patient foe.

My aunt recounts one particular night when I slept over at her house in Berkeley. I was three-years-old, Pixar-adorable, and kept tip-toeing out of the bedroom in my little blue night shirt and white undies to propose requests.

“My mouth feels dry, I have to drink water before I sleep– slowly, so my tongue will absorb more of the water.”

“I have to use the bathroom again. Stomachache from dinner, I think.”

“Can you tell me another story? A really short one. A reeally really short one.”

“Let me tell you a story now.”

When finally banished to the room for good, my night adventures would then begin. My bed would transform into a small, wooden dinghy, my sheets makeshift sails, and I would brave the harsh, cold seas with my brave animal comrades, Hamilton and Cordelia. Then my boat became a cave and my sheets would be the cave walls that sheltered Hamilton, Cordelia, and me from the winter snow while I cooked up complicated dishes to suit everyone’s picky taste buds. Suddenly, the entire room was the ocean and I would swim around like Ariel the mermaid, exploring the nooks and crannies of this new underwater land and making friends that were carefully hidden in coral reefs. Best of all, my bed would become a fort and I would muffle the light of my lamp with my fort covering so I could read at my leisure unbothered and undetected for hours. My bed served many purposes those long nights, but it was only until my eyes started drooping did it actually fulfill its marketed bed-destiny.

It all sounds like fun and games, but when I think back to it, there was always more to my nightly escapes than just that. There’s something about the nighttime that has always does something to me, and I felt it even as a little kid. There’s a stark loneliness in it, one which is too loud in its quietness and too silent in its isolation.

My bed no longer transforms into wonderful ships or forts; Hamilton and Cordelia are too grown-up to play with me anymore, and they prefer sitting quietly in retirement, keeping their arms, legs, and conversations to themselves. But I remain awake as ever, with no magic now to distract from the fact that I just can’t get myself to fall asleep. And now, time has made its heavy existence present in a way I never noticed when I was younger– the slow crawl of seconds that turns two to three, three to four, and four to five. These are the long hours that stretch like an solitary, unending road, vanishing beyond sight. As I lie in bed alone in the dark, sleep doesn’t come, but that loneliness does, like an old acquaintance. It worms in from pit of my stomach, and it resonates within me in such a familiar and deep way that it doesn’t feel strange or alarming at all; and while there’s dread, it’s dull. It feels natural. It is as if my hours in the real world with friends and parents and food movies and conversations have all been mere distractions and the real show has now finally begun.

Having someone to sleep with helps. It was easy to go to sleep then, wrapping your arms around someone who can travel the road with you, feeling their warm, soft body close by. But relationships end. For a long time after one break-up, I slept night after night in the living room on a white, squashy couch in front of the television, my own room abandoned and empty at nights for months.

As of late, I’ve taken to reading long hours into the night again for comfort, and there is a growing stack of finished books on the floor next to my bed. But it suddenly hit me one night: virtually all the books that I’ve been rereading these past couple of nights have been books I enjoyed as a kid: all the Roald Dahl books, all the Lois Lowery books, books by Konigsberg, Fitzhugh, C.S. Lewis, Burnett, and the Harry Potter books. I felt a sharp stab of unease, which prompted me to put down my Harry Potter book, get out of bed, stare at the stack of brightly-colored books next to it, and think again: every night, for the past two weeks, I have been rereading nothing but children’s books one after the other for hours and hours until the wee hours of the morning. It’s beginning to feel like a compulsion. Is this just a quirky phase I’m going through? Some people drink hot milk or get their eyebrows waxed or shop ’till they drop to feel better, I read old, favorite YA books. Is this latest trend the start of a psychological unraveling that’s beginning to manifest in real life actions?  Am I becoming that person who picks up more and more odd ticks until one day, he starts eating his own feces at a dinner party and then sincerely wonders why people appear alarmed?

I was suddenly struck with a mental image of me rocking in a fetal position with all my children’s books cradled in my arms and a lightening-shaped scar drawn crudely on my forehead with a Crayola marker.

Well that, my friends, is not going to happen. I am going to go face to face with the darkness. I will no longer seek the cheap, but oh-so-comforting embrace of young adult literature. I will find solace in something that is more fulfilling, more invigorating, more engaging, more real. And when I find it, then maybe at nights, I won’t feel that feeling anymore.

I don’t know what thing is yet, but I do know two things: J.K. Rowling writes terrible dialogue and this will be the end of the second week straight that I’m awake past 4 in the morning.