Rest Comes With the Morning

Trigger warning: This story contains a brief reference to suicide and mentions of death.

        I never wanted to fall asleep as a child after realizing that sleeping was as near to dying as a person could get. The mind shuts down and attempts to block out all the things that make up the parts of life—sights, sounds, feelings so strong that they make the body react in physical ways. Like vomiting before an exam or experiencing that little buzzing hum in the tongue and at the back of the neck the first time someone is kissed for love and not lust. Remove each of these sensations and we are left with quiet, paralyzed darkness. It isn’t a frightening paralysis, but rather more like watching a doctor press a pin against your skin and feeling nothing. Besides dreaming and the possibility of being roused in the morning by the sun, or a bird, or the screech of an alarm, sleeping is very much like dying.

           Perhaps this is when I became a willful insomniac. I remember being six years old and telling my mother these thoughts about sleeping and dying.

           “Don’t be an idiot, Ruth,” she’d said. “Sleep is sleep, and if you don’t wake up in the morning, you won’t know you’re dead anyway.” Her eyes had fallen then. “It’s the people left who wake up and suffer.”

           That terrified me even more—to think that each night as I laid down and gave in to rest, I was risking and consenting to the possibility of never emerging from the darkness of sleep. Would I be trapped there, screaming in a soundless voice at a sun that will not come for me? Sleep was no longer rest for me, it was a battle of wills. And I have gotten pretty good at winning.

           “Ruth?”

           “Hm?”

           “I’m going to bed sweetheart,” Luke says. He lays a hand on my shoulder.

           “Goodnight.” I reply.

           “Are you coming anytime soon?”

           “I don’t know, there’s still a lot I have to do,” I say, adding more notes to the paper I’m editing tonight—high school admissions essays about dreams and other bullshit.

           “Can’t it wait till tomorrow?” Luke asks.

           “You know I can’t stand to live by that philosophy,” I start to say.

           Luke groans, “Yeah I know. I’ve heard it too many times.”

           “Relying on the concept of tomorrow is as insane as saving it for another life.”

           “Ruth come on—”

           “And sleeping to avoid the responsibilities of a life is a toe dipped into suicide. All the benefits of the release without the frightening permanence.”

           Luke starts towards the bedroom. I’m never sure if my words affect him or if he cuts them down to bite size slivers of charming sarcasm. I love your dark humor, he used to tell me when we were teenagers poking fun at romantic comedies on the sofa in the basement at his parents’ house. Maybe my learned and practiced animosity towards sleep was beginning to affect him. He stops in the doorway.

           “You know, it’s not such a bad thing to let go of that tight grip of control you’re holding,” he says quietly. My jaw softens and I meet his gaze. Little lines have appeared under his eyes, cut by a long day’s work and deepened by the tired and dazed portrait of a human female that is his wife.

           “Goodnight,” I say.

           “Sweet dreams,” he says, winking at me because he already knows the reply.

           “Save them for the morning,” I say. The bedroom door gently closes. “When you have the light and the consciousness to make them come true,” I mutter to myself as I open a new essay. A gurgling sound from the kitchen startles me—my coffee has finished percolating and it’s time to refill the thermos Luke bought me as a gift. Now he calls it my IV and jokes that I ought to insert the straw right into my arm. Sometimes I’m afraid that in my states of waking delirium in the longer hours of the night, I will drag a knife along my veins and try it.

           My mother used to wake up and find me sitting cross-legged in front of the open door of the refrigerator. The fluorescent light and the chill were a perfect remedy for fatigue. She’d yank me back by my hair and slam the door shut, shouting about the cost of electricity.

           “I can’t change that you’re dim, but I can damn well stop your wastefulness.” She’d say and smack the sides of my head, making my ears burn. The pain took the grogginess from my eyes, and I’d felt a deep love for my mother then. She’d return to her bed, and I’d sit on top of the kitchen counter with bags of frozen peas pressed to both sides of my head, my gaze fixed on the light of the moon through the dark window.

           Creamer and espresso powder dissolve into my coffee, just enough to cut the bitterness. After starting another pot, I make my way quietly to Mose’s room. The moon-shaped lamp beside his bed casts long shadows of his little form onto the ceiling. He has his mother’s need for light and his father’s mop of wild hair. I reach down and place two fingers beneath his nose until I feel the warmth of his breath on my skin. His brow furrows.

           “Mama?”

           “Shh…” I place my palm against his forehead. “Everything is safe.”

           He grumbles and turns over, pulling the comforter tighter around his shoulders.

           “Everything is safe.”

           I walk quietly from Mose’s room, leaving the door cracked so that I won’t wake him when I come back in an hour. Luke is waiting for me in the hall, bearing that look of tired disdain whose burden I’ve grown used to bearing. He follows me into the light of the kitchen.

           “This is getting ridiculous,” he says.

           “I thought you were sleeping,” I reply.

           “When will you sleep?”

           I sigh and meet his gaze. “Go back to bed. Let me spend my nights in my own way.”

           “What do you think is going to happen?” he asks.

           “I just like to stay ahead of everything, and nights are the perfect time to—”

           “I meant to Moses.” Luke says. I fiddle with the lid of my thermos, running my finger around the spillage on the lid.

           “I don’t know,” I say quietly.

           “Tell me what you think will happen Ruth,” he says, his voice growing louder. “Tell me, tell me why.”

           “Stop.”

           “No, tell me. Look at yourself Ruth. Your body is begging for rest.”

           “I said stop.”

           “And I can’t keep listening to you pace through the house like a ghost, I can’t sleep anymore! I wake up twenty-five times a night to the sounds of you haunting our son’s room!”

           “Fine!” My hand slams flat against the counter. “You’re welcome, dammit! Twenty-five mornings is better than none at all, don’t you see? His breath on my finger and your restlessness, and my pacing around the house!”

           Luke grips my arm, “Quiet, you’ll wake Mose.”

           “Then he will know that he is safe!” I wrench myself from his grasp. “He’ll know that his mother loves him!” My fingers tighten into fists. I press them against my eyes, rubbing at the weariness that burns in them. Luke takes the pot from the coffee maker and empties it into the sink.

           “This is going to stop,” he says softly.

           Stop. It’s okay, stop crying. My sister Julia had been a fussy baby, but her skin was the loveliest shade of peach and she had beautiful pale hair that fell in wisps about her head. After our mother had moved her crib into my bedroom, I would be roused from sleep by the sounds of her cries. I’d stand above her and spin her mobile, cooing softly until she’d fall back into the delicate and rose-hued peace of a baby’s slumber. In my mind, she was my baby. And I was the keeper of her sleep.

           One night I had slept especially peacefully. The sun filtered through the blinds into our bedroom and I went to praise Julia for how well she had slept through the night. I said her name softly, but she didn’t wake. Her cheek felt like ice against my fingers. I stared at her chest beneath the flowered blanket, willing it to rise and fall. She was still. And I was faced with swallowing the realization that sleep could steal away a thing as precious as life as swiftly and as silently as any waking danger. Only it struck under the pretense of peace and rest.

           I feel the warmth against my fingers and pull my hand away from Mose’s face. His eyelashes flutter gently, and I wish for a moment that I could catch and store his dreams. Leaving the door cracked, I feel my way through the darkness to the bedroom. Luke’s soft breathing fills the silence as he sleeps, his back turned to my side of the bed. I slowly lower myself onto the mattress, sitting with my head against the wall. A single streak of light shines on the wall in the hallway from the lamp in my son’s room. I keep my gazed fixed there, one eye on the light and the other on the morning.