A Night Owl Proposal

cw: reference to suicide, death, blood, violence

I envy the dead because, unlike us, the dead get to sleep forever.

Only I don’t know many dead people — other than a few distant relatives. Strangers tied to me by the smallest drop of blood, like my one Aunt Margaret who always wore capris and a Winnie-the-Pooh sweatshirt and who, on the few occasions I did meet, either questioned my weight and degree choice or was in utter disbelief — and I’m talking, like, completely and genuinely dumbfounded — that I was once a baby, and then, twenty or whatever years later, not a baby.

Since I don’t know many dead people, most of the people I know are living, and living people are the worst. It’s part of the reason I can’t find the strength, the willpower, the early-bird volition, to open my eyes and face the day and people in it. And for that reason and other reasons to follow, I would like to humbly propose, if you can find it in your heart, to let me sleep in for just five more minutes before I head out to work this Tuesday morning.

Hear me out.

For one, the daylight scares the daylights out of me. I’d rather be in the dark, a child again, looking up at the plastic glow-in-the-dark stars my dad tacked on the popcorn ceiling of our suburban Southern California home when I asked him if there was a way to make it always be nighttime, where the stars never slept and neither did I, as long as the moon was out and the sun was gone and people were asleep.

Creatures of the night like ghosts, spiders, and sleep paralysis demons aren’t really all that bad when you get to know them, anyway. They make much better company than creatures of the day — creatures of the day like debt collectors, one-uppers, and people who whack weeds at 7 AM on a Sunday. I would much rather have coffee with or even be flatmates with a creature of the night who eats human kidneys than with a creature of the morning, like my neighbor Richard, who whacks weeds at 7 AM on the dot every Sunday. I have a perfectly good kidney to spare, anyway, but only a limited amount of self-restraint left in my reserve not to wake up even earlier and use my own weed whacker. Not on the weeds, of course.

And for the record, I’m not serious. I'm not that kind of person. I don’t have that in me.

That as in the gut-burning drive to wake up before 7 AM. To drink coffee and do crossword puzzles and cut little strawberry slices for my low-carb buttermilk pancakes. You can do all those things in your sleep, anyway — in your dreams — but why would you when, in your dreams, you could live in a stained-glass palace or something. You could grow bird wings and fly, so long as they’re not the wings of an early bird, because those kind of birds just fly straight out of dreamland and right into places like 8 AM Pilates classes and unnervingly bright cubicles.

I’ve simply never been a morning person. The kind to inflict pain on myself with cold plunge showers and chant self-affirmations with coffee breath in the mirror like I'm performing some kind of voodoo on my self-doubts.

That’s because, when it’s morning, you have to leave the warm haven of your bed to scrub your mouth clean and wash down birth control pills with pulp-free orange juice, so that you don’t bring any other poor soul into this world of early birds and telemarketers and clipboard people camping outside grocery stores to guilt-trip you about the dying bumblebees when all you wanted was Chips Ahoy to numb the guilt you’ve already collected over the years from all the missed opportunities over missing your alarm. It's this grating, early-bird world of trading in the cold side of the pillow and your 100-count comforter for scratchy, cold slacks and saying hi to people you will never see again; of getting up to leave professional voicemails in your I’ve-never-been-constipated-before-or-sad-or-so-depressed-that-I-contemplated-drinking-insecticide voice.

And for that reason alone, I propose, with a humble, sleepy heart, that I sleep for five more minutes, in addition to the five minutes you’ve already so generously given me.

Sure, EArLY bIrD gEtS tHe wOrM, the go-getters of the world might argue. True. Fair enough. But, as the sleepyheads of the world would like to counter argue, the night owl gets the moon, an orchestra of swamp animals serenading you, the Big Dipper and Orion watching over you, and the unrivaled joy of eating leftover pad thai under the soft, cool glow of the fridge in your softest underwear as the rest of the world sleeps and the grandfather clock clacks louder than it does during the day, as if, contrary to long-held early-bird beliefs, these are the seconds, the minutes, the hours that matter the most.

So spare me five more minutes, and I promise my feet will be on the ground. Please. Pretty please, with a cherry on top that is as juicy and as sweet as the dream I’m waist-deep in right now. Lewis and Clark need me. They need me more than the invoices and emails and voicemails I’ve yet to sort through this Tuesday morning. My name is now Sacagawea, and there’s a baby boy named Jean-Baptiste on my hip who, despite all the corn and buckwheat I feed him, never grows. Clark tells me that maybe Jean-Baptiste will be a baby forever. And by that reasoning, he says, maybe I will be young forever. I think he is falling in love with me. It would be rude of me to wake up and ghost him.

Yes, I know I said five minutes, but you can’t complete an expedition in five minutes. I said my feet would be on the ground, and, technically, they are on the ground, leading Lewis and my future husband westward to the Pacific Ocean.

So, please, give me ten more minutes, because there are still loose plot threads in my dream I’m knitting into stories that we can wrap ourselves in later on when we’re cold, sad, and lonely.

And look! A plot hole, and now an actual hole so big that I and my baby who does not grow have fallen into, deep into the earth, where the worms the night owls never get to eat burrow and where Aunt Margaret has been buried for the last fifty years.

“My how you’ve changed since I last saw you!” I say when I see her. “The last time I saw you fifty years ago, you were 98. I’m surprised you’re not still alive.”

Before she can respond, I wake up, but please — I’m not ready, and to be fair, we never clarified ten minutes from when, so to keep my word and make it precisely ten minutes, we will start the countdown . . . twenty minutes from now.

And so it’s been twenty minutes, and as I promised, we will start the ten-minute countdown now. I will even set a timer.

Until then, sweet dreams.

***

Yes, I know. It’s been ten minutes. I hear the timer, but if you give me an extra five minutes, I promise, pinky-promise this time, I will be wide-eyed and sorting through those voicemails, invoices, and emails waiting for me in my cubicle.

The only issue is that I am very sleepy, too sleepy to lift my hand and hook my pinky with your pinky. So if you could please do me a favor and reach under my soft, plush blanket I love so much and hook your pinky with my pinky, then we will have a pinky promise, and those are the kind of promises that can’t be broken.

***

Okay. Hear me out. It was just a pinky. Not an arm, leg, or vital organ.

Now that I really think about it, out of all our fingers, we use our pinkies the least. Why call it a pinky promise, other than for the sake of alliteration, which is a pretty pathetic reason if you ask me.

What we should’ve done is a blood oath. Maybe if you poke a hole in my hand to get the blood needed for this blood oath we’re about to perform, it will wake me up. Cold water and Nokia alarm tones set to full volume never worked on me. Stabbing me will.

***

Hey again. Did you stab me yet? Because, if you did, I didn’t feel it. Either that, or you’ve stabbed me so hard that I’m no longer resting but resting in peace.

I have probably entered REM. I’ve also been called a heavy sleeper, so it makes sense if I didn’t feel it. There was one time in my childhood when I slept through an earthquake so strong in my Southern California home that some of those glow-in-the-dark stars on my ceiling rained down on me like a plastic meteor shower. So you’ll have to stab me again, harder this time. There’s a steak knife in my top kitchen drawer that might work.

Better yet, I’ll swear on something BIG, like someone’s grave, so that you know I’m for real this time. Not my mom’s grave or my dad’s grave or my sister or brother’s grave, of course, and definitely not my late Russian dwarf hamster Mr. Chompers’ grave.

But . . . what I will do is swear on my Aunt Margaret’s grave.

***

Okay. It’s been twenty minutes. Maybe more. But it’s not like it was Mr. Chompers’ grave.

RIP, little man.

Either way, this time is going to be the time. I’m getting up now. Not in five minutes from now but now, because I'm late.

In fact, it’s already nine, but, look! I’m up.

I shower and make pancakes. And then I’m barreling down the 805-South to look at my invoices, emails, and voicemails. I console myself with the silver lining of the situation, reasoning with myself that had I started driving thirty, even five minutes earlier, In Too Deep by Genesis wouldn’t be playing on the radio. It’s perfect timing. I made it just in time to be reminded of a song I forgot about — it’s a sign, a gift, a stroke of luck. That is, until the song cuts short and the radio plays my alarm. Yet again, I’ve dreamt of getting up.

But doesn’t that count for something? I even showered and made pancakes, all from scratch. Even though it was a dream, all that work has me beat. For that reason, I propose you allot me at least five more minutes of sleep to recover from all that cooking. Then, I promise, I’ll head out to work.

Except now I can’t even fall back asleep because it’s 7 AM and Richard is whacking his weeds.

It’s Sunday.