I Can't Sleep Tonight

The night air hung thick as honey through the open bedroom window, carrying the distant hum of cicadas and the occasional rumble of a late truck on Highway 9. Ezra Holloway stood in the doorway of his daughter's room, saxophone case propped against his hip, watching seven-year-old Luna burrow deeper into her pillow fortress.

"Daddy?" Her voice emerged muffled from beneath a constellation of stuffed animals. "I can't sleep."

Ezra set down his case and crossed to her bed, the floorboards creaking their familiar tune under his feet. Three months on the road with the Midnight Express Jazz Quartet, and he was still relearning the language of his own house. "What's keeping you up, little bird?"

Luna's head popped up, dark curls defying gravity. "My brain won't turn off. It keeps making noise."

He perched on the edge of her bed, recognizing the restlessness that plagued both father and daughter. "What kind of noise?"

"Like..." She scrunched her face in concentration. "Like when you practice scales, but all mixed up and playing at the same time."

Ezra felt something twist in his chest. Diane was pulling another double at the hospital—her fourth this week—leaving him to navigate bedtime solo while his own mind churned with the mortgage notice he'd shoved into the kitchen drawer and the gaping silence where his phone should be ringing with gig offers.

"You know what I do when my brain gets too noisy?" He brushed a curl from her forehead. "I give it something better to listen to."

"Like what?"

"Like this." He retrieved his saxophone, the familiar weight settling into his hands like a prayer. The first notes drifted soft and low—a lullaby his own father used to hum while working late in the garage, back when the world seemed infinite and manageable.

Luna's eyes widened. "That's pretty. But won't it keep me awake?"

"Music doesn't keep you awake, sweetheart. It teaches you how to rest." The melody shifted, following an older rhythm now, something that lived in his bones rather than his mind. "See, most people think practice means playing the same thing over and over until you get it right. But that's not practice—that's just repetition."

"What's the difference?"

Ezra let the saxophone speak for him, the notes weaving around her question like smoke. "Practice is when you let your life fill up your music, and you let your music fill up your life. It's like learning a new language—not just the words, but the feelings behind the words."

Luna sat up straighter, her earlier restlessness transforming into attention. "I can't sleep either," she announced with the gravity of someone sharing a state secret.

"I know, baby girl."

"No, I mean really can't. Not just tonight. It's like my dreams are too big for my head."

The saxophone went quiet in his hands. Outside, a dog barked once and fell silent, leaving only the thick August air and the weight of understanding passing between father and daughter.

"Tell me about these big dreams."

"I dream about flying, but not in airplanes. Flying like music flies—all curvy and smooth and going places that don't have names yet." She hugged her knees to her chest. "And sometimes I dream about colors that don't exist, and I wake up trying to remember what they looked like, but they're gone."

Ezra set the saxophone across his lap, struck by the realization that his daughter was describing exactly what he'd been chasing on stages from Portland to Phoenix—those moments when the music lifted off the page and became something alive and unnamed.

"Maybe," he said carefully, "your dreams are too big for sleep. Maybe they need somewhere else to go."

"Like where?"

"Like into the world. Like into songs." He lifted the saxophone again. "What if we made a deal? You pick a letter, and I'll play you something that starts with that letter. We'll build a whole alphabet of songs, and maybe by the time we get to Z, those big dreams will have found a place to land."

Luna's eyes lit up. "Like the alphabet game we play in the car?"

"Exactly like that, but with music instead of license plates."

"A!" she announced without hesitation.

Marcus thought for a moment, then began a slow, ascending melody—"All of Me," but stripped down to its essential longing, each note carrying the weight of every musician who'd ever played it in a small club at 2 AM for an audience of empty chairs and one person who really needed to hear it.

"That sounds like missing someone," Luna observed.

"It is. It's about how missing someone can be beautiful too, because it means you have someone worth missing."

"B!"

This time he played something faster, a bebop line that danced around itself like joy learning to walk. Luna giggled and bounced on her bed, her hands moving in approximation of his fingers on the keys.

"That one sounds like laughing in the rain!"

"Close. It's called 'Blue Monk,' but you're right about the laughing part. The best music always has some laughter hiding inside it, even the sad songs."

They moved through the alphabet like explorers mapping new territory. C brought "Cherokee," with its complex changes that Marcus simplified into something that sounded like wind through tall grass. D was "Django's Tiger," all playful aggression and controlled chaos that made Luna clap her hands.

By E—"Embraceable You," played so tenderly it seemed to caress the very air—Luna had curled up on her side, her breathing deeper but her eyes still alert.

"This one sounds like hugging," she murmured.

"It's supposed to. It's about holding onto the people who matter, even when everything else is changing."

They were halfway through the alphabet when Luna's contributions began to slow, her letter choices coming with longer pauses between them. Marcus found himself improvising around traditional songs, letting his own restlessness speak through the horn in ways his voice couldn't manage.

"P," she whispered when they reached the difficult letters.

He played "Polka Dots and Moonbeams," but transformed it into something that spoke of possibility rather than nostalgia, each phrase reaching toward tomorrow instead of yesterday. The notes seemed to hang in the humid air like promises.

"That sounds like hoping," Luna said, her voice thick with approaching sleep.

"It is hoping. It's what I play when I need to remember that morning always comes, even after the longest nights."

"Q is hard," she mumbled into her pillow.

Marcus smiled, launching into "Quiet Storm," but played so gently it was barely more than breath across brass, a song that acknowledged the beauty of stillness without surrendering to it.

By S—"Skylark," reimagined as a prayer for safe passage through dark hours—Luna's eyes had drifted closed, but her breathing told him she was still listening, still traveling with him through this midnight alphabet of songs and stories.

"T," she whispered, the word barely audible.

"This one's called 'Take Five,'" Marcus murmured, his own voice growing soft. "It's about finding your own rhythm, even when the whole world is keeping different time."

The melody unfolded in its strange meter, five beats instead of four, like a heartbeat slightly out of sync with ordinary time. It was a song about being different, about finding beauty in the spaces where others heard awkwardness.

Luna's breathing had settled into the slow rhythm of deep sleep, but Marcus continued playing, reaching the end of their alphabet with songs for letters she'd never called—"Until the Real Thing Comes Along" for U, "Very Thought of You" for V, Wes Montgomery's "West Coast Blues" for W.

For X, he played his own improvisation, a song without name or precedent, built from the sound of his daughter's breathing and the promise of tomorrow's possibilities. Y brought "Yardbird Suite," Charlie Parker's gift to the world, played soft as a lullaby but still carrying all its revolutionary fire.

And finally Z—"Zenith," another improvisation, this one reaching toward some distant star, some point of light that justified all the darkness surrounding it.

The saxophone went quiet, and for the first time in months, Ezra felt something approaching peace. The bills would still be there in the morning, the phone would still maintain its stubborn silence, and Diane would still come home exhausted from healing other people's emergencies. But tonight, in this room filled with the fading echoes of an alphabet's worth of songs, he'd remembered why music mattered.

His daughter slept the deep sleep of the innocent, her dreams now apparently finding room to unfold without waking her. Outside, the night was beginning its slow surrender to dawn, the cicadas giving way to the first experimental tweets of early birds.

Ezra placed the saxophone back in its case with the reverence of someone handling something holy. As he reached the doorway, Luna stirred slightly, her voice emerging from the depths of sleep:

"I can't sleep... because I'm flying too high to land."

He paused, hand on the light switch, struck by the perfect logic of her dream-talk. Maybe that was the secret he'd been searching for all these months on the road, all these nights lying awake calculating and recalculating the mathematics of survival. Maybe the point wasn't to land safely, but to fly high enough that landing became irrelevant.

In the hallway, Ezra allowed himself one moment of quiet triumph. Tomorrow he would call Eddie Washington about that residency at the Blue Moon. Tomorrow he would stop checking his phone every five minutes like a teenager waiting for a text. Tomorrow he would practice what he'd just preached to his daughter—letting his life fill his music, and letting his music fill his life.

But tonight, for the first time in longer than he could remember, the sweetest song of all was the sound of his daughter sleeping, dreaming of colors that didn't exist yet and flights that needed no landing strip, while the dog days of August finally began their slow retreat toward autumn, toward change, toward whatever came next.

In the morning, Luna would wake with no memory of their musical alphabet, but she would hum unfamiliar melodies while brushing her teeth, and she would ask her father to teach her the names of the notes that lived inside her dreams. And Ezra would realize that the best gigs weren't the ones that paid the most money—they were the ones that paid in moments like this, when music became a bridge between one heart and another, when "I can't sleep" transformed from complaint to confession to, finally, to peace.

The night air stirred the curtains one last time as dawn approached, carrying with it the promise that sometimes, when you stop fighting the restlessness and start listening to what it's trying to tell you, you discover that sleeplessness isn't a problem to be solved—it's a song waiting to be played.