When You Can’t Sleep

i wonder if people who can sleep through the night appreciate how lucky they are. you really have to go through the endless nights of waking up every two or three hours. and the long gaps spent trying to fall asleep. trying to situate your arms and hands and legs so that they won’t creep into uncomfortable positions and wake you any sooner than you’ll already waken.

so this time i’m out of bed, i unpacked some more stuff, the candles essentially. they’re in the bottom of the china cabinet. now if i could only get the china unpacked from the boxes it moved here in three years ago. i must have the slowest progress of anyone i know. though if you count the fact that i get out of bed every two or three hours and unpack something perhaps you can say i’m at least persistent.

i feel almost like macbeth. just without the guilt of murdering folks. i have plenty of guilt–that chapter promised to mday that will likely never materialize, book proposals promised to pete, unwritten letters, unwashed clothes, undone to-dos. i’m just not murdering folks. i’ll go back to bed, and tasks i can’t even think of now will begin marching through my head, telling me how simple they would be to write, to accomplish. i do a thousand things in those moments when i’m not asleep, lying there in the bed and make plans to do a thousand more. so simple they seem and yet when i get up, as hard to accomplish as sleep is to find.