The Humming Cicada

“I can’t sleep.”

The man tossed around under the sheets, tried every segment of his pillow, and contorted his body to several adventurous yoga shapes in an effort to quell the restlessness.

Finally, he called it. Looking at his watch to determine the precise time of death, it read: 1:42 AM. The fight was over, so like other nights, he retreated onto his back with his hands folded over his chest, looking at the ceiling blankly. 

Now in his 5th year of living alone, he had taken to the habit of occasionally talking to himself. If a thought vibrated long enough in the forefront of his mind, he released it as a monotone whisper. He couldn’t sleep, this was apparent by now.

“What’s the matter now?” He went on interrogating himself.

He hated how his apartment bedroom looked. Empty and bare, save the few novels that were scattered around carelessly, earmarked archaically. Someone had suggested it might help with his organization if he removed distractions and unnecessary furniture from the bedroom, which explained the nomadic themed decoration choice. For every item that was removed, four or so books had replaced it. As for the effectiveness of the self-help remedy, he had yet to see any promising results. 

Left awake, he couldn’t resist delving into the selfish folds of his own ambitions. Some dreamers found themselves induced through heavy sleep, while the man on the bed found his dreams were the very cause of his sleepless nights. His destiny simply HAD to be dissected and reassembled during these witching hours. Left exhausted from the day, the only place he had time to reformulate and reflect was here. It’s a big world, where would he leave his mark?

 A preference for tales from the past left him hopelessly crestfallen when considering options for his own future. Pirates were dead and hung and the cowboy’s torch had long faded into the fluorescence of comforts and sophistication. He knew that everything new and on the brink of exciting discovery was to be unraveled in tiny 1’s and 0’s, an online frontier. Maybe someone would find a way to crunch more data into a smaller space, develop a convincingly subtle AI sex-chat service, or toil away long enough behind a screen to develop an app that could captivate the youth for longer than 5 minutes at a dinner table. 

Achievements of this kind felt cheap, shallow, and were of no interest to him. No, this wasn’t the field where he’d make big waves, it had to be physical. A creation he could touch, something to see grow within an impressive stack of satin blueprints and crude prototypes. 

This idealization of the tangible creation could be attributed to the reading material he had amassed within the last 3 or so uninspiring years of early adulthood. As chivalry novels had bewitched the immortal Don Quixote, 19th century novels, centered around men of great ingenuity, had supplied the thread to the restless man’s incessant nocturnal daydreams.

Morning commutes and lunch breaks spent reading stories like Robinson Crusoe, Twenty-Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Frankenstein, and David Copperfield had fed his determined fascination with the old breed of clever, determined men. His idols were rebels, natural geniuses, and captains. Learned men taking hold of their destinies in both hands and sailing in protest to the storms of hardships they faced, bearing nothing but their wit and an iron-crafted will. A will proven so potent, that it bordered on obsession. In short, he longed for an old-fashioned sort of industry. Entrepreneurship, manufacturing, international trade, handshakes, the invention of something… real. Something beneficial. He wanted to join the ranks of the great, to ascend to a higher calling.

Try as he may however, he could never realize any of these visions of greatness past their initial planning phases. The halls of his memory were lined with previous determinations, aborted machinations, each one serving as a constant forewarning, that any future undertakings might soon take their place here too; framed and hung up like dried out fossils. An overambitious and unfinished senior year science fair project, left buried in the closet, an array of papers, half-assembled for the purpose of forming a startup company, one that never got past the DBA name filing application, and a piano lesson coupon which was never cashed in, instead left crumpled and abandoned in a kitchen drawer full of nondescript items. These were among his menagerie of ugly mementos.

He avoided reminders of his snubbed endeavors as the owner of a haunted house might avoid spirits hiding behind doors or around hallways. Regardless, his own ghosts always inevitably returned to him at night in the form of mental pangs. In short, he was painfully conscious of his inability to follow things through. Everyone has a monkey on their back, and this was his. 

Nobody feels their shortcomings more than an average person who had been told their whole life that they would be great one day. The western world sells the idea of “special” to adults through tv and media, who turn around and pawn it off to their own kids by the spoonful at bed time, so who’s to blame when everyone grows up thinking themselves to be the next Warren Buffet, or Jimmy Buffet? He too was a victim of this sort of hopeful rearing. At least, he wagered, not many people by his age had broken from the spell as thoroughly as he had. There’s a fine silvery line that runs between cynicism and pragmatism, and he walked carefully along it when weighing his own strengths. He knew that greatness came with a price, paid in a currency most aren’t willing to part with, and that hard work and determination prevails over frivolous dreams. 

Sometime this last year, he had reached a conclusion that he suffered from fits of ambition exclusively late at night. Consequently, this meant that by the next morning, he would regress into former habits of laziness, forgetting the previous determinations and kick into autopilot mode. For every step made by night towards achieving any progress, two steps were taken in the opposite direction during the hours of his day; spread somewhere between work, fast food, the bus ride home, and the walk up his apartment stairs. He was sure that this hidden struggle within himself was coming to some sort of cataclysmic boiling point, but in what state it would render him, he was less confident of.

What’s more, he acknowledged only two possible lifestyles to be led. To clarify, this meant that one was to either adopt a doctrine of full commitment to dogmatic excellence or none at all. Caught between two extremes, with the meat and potatoes of moderation disregarded completely, meant that according to his restrictive standards, he would either end up a shining success, or a dismal loser. Unrealistic goals were set in place by night, but the follow-through never came in the day. By the very next night, he had already felt the loss of his failure to meet a standard. His cycle was self-completing, and left him in a perpetual no-win situation. How and when he’d emerge from it, awakened as a brilliant new man, was unknown.

From after work until midnight, he would write down a list of itemized changes he meant to make the following day. Things would be different, he would be different, reborn as a new man. Bad habits would be crushed pitifully, left behind in his changing wake, and replaced gracefully with virtuous ones, such as newly adopted daily exercises or language study sessions. Admirable behaviors would adhere themselves to his character, dethroning the old threadbare personality, which he knew was timid and mildly disagreeable at best. His focus would be sharpened to that of a monk’s, and people would see him as a force of will to be reckoned with. 

He couldn’t sleep after these resolutions were determined, and would go on picturing changes to be made to his newly proposed policies, which is exactly what he was doing at this very hour in the night. Had he overlooked something, a minute detail? Was this new and improved self really attainable, or did he have to start with a more realistic set of tenets? How many times had he already attempted a metamorphosis of this kind without a fruitful result? No, this time would be the one, he was positive of his power to overcome his unconscious failures this time. No more soda, no more slacking off. 

Still, round and round, these thoughts churned above his bed while he stared fixedly at the roof. He scratched a new amendment into his notebook on the nightstand every so often when they came to him. 

Like most chronic overthinkers, he had developed some methods for calming his mind when it was like this. Tonight was no different from the countless other nights, so he got up and pulled the blankets off his bed. The treatment was simple. He put some perfectly dry blankets in the dryer, then wrapped himself in them, laying heated and warm on the ground of the apartment like a bundled cocoon. He’d pretend it was Christmas, and that he was a kid again, tucked in under the tree. For around 10 minutes, he experienced a gentle numbness; fallen into a child’s bliss. Thoughts of destiny abated, as the feeling of adulthood drifted away, taking with it the weight and burden of responsibility. Children don’t know how good they have it until they’re older. The radiator on the wall clicked on, as a noisy car’s subwoofer passed by outside. 

Suddenly, he’s sucked right back onto the beige-carpeted floor, and the blankets are cold again. In those few minutes of illusion however, the dread of indecision slipped away, retiring to the back porch of his mind to have a quick smoke. But it was only a fraction of the feeling.

This repeating mirage was always accompanied by a warm familiar sound. Something old, and forgotten. A quiet popping, more of a fuzzy static, pulsing sensation. Like amplified underwater silence. He did tell a doctor once, and upon listening to the description, she suggested it may be the remembered sound of a parent’s heartbeat as he slept on their chest, or maybe blood flow in the inner ear. Could be, or it might be a childhood blanket, the ancient memory of its fabric rubbing against his ear. He was convinced for a while that it was the white noise of all the appliances in his early home blurred into a single homogeneous spectrum, or maybe just the sound of the ocean. A poetic friend once joked that it was the machinery of his brain in motion, his own internal resonant hum. 

Whatever it was, he could never form a distinct identity of it, as the edges never quite sharpened clearly enough to do so. The closest he got was “loud silence”. It’s hard to focus on something like that without losing it entirely, a reverse pink elephant of sorts.

Nonetheless, Dread finishes his cigarette, crushes it beneath a squeaky boot step, and struts back into the room, accompanied by the cold draft and clicking of the radiator. Suddenly, the dazzling strings of red and green lights, a plastic tree missing its top segment, the matching ruby-red gift wrapping, a tired, coffee-breathed mother mummified in a robe, the sloppy painted edges of the cream fireplace, all vanish away; like pulling the blinds open on captured vampires. The sound leaves just as suddenly too. 

The half-read books and trash full of takeout boxes settle back into their respective place in the room. He reached over and scribbled down a rule about getting more sleep in the future, then checked his watch.

“4 hours and 24 minutes until my shift. I can't sleep.” 

He reluctantly got up to stuff some more blankets into the dryer. This procedure repeats itself multiple times on bad nights, and the suspicious lady across the hall watches him through her peephole during his many trips to the laundry room. She thinks he’s stealing socks. Sometimes she’s right.