A Night’s Sleep

I don’t remember when my insomnia started, or rather I don’t remember a time when it wasn’t there, as an active presence or a latent (I almost said dormant) threat. I remember, as a child, having hot milk in the dark—was it 4:00 a.m.? was it 5:00 a.m.?—with my father, an insomniac like me. I remember summers spent with my cousins, who slept until midday. I woke at dawn or before and spent several hours on my own, careful not to make any noise, eating cookies slowly and reading stacks of old comic books illuminated by my uncle’s tiny desk lamp. I’ve sometimes said these hours made me a reader, but the claim is probably spurious, a way to find an upside to it all. In truth, I think the lesson I learned from those summers was how to live with envy. As the sunlight changed from light purple to white and golden yellow, I’d feel boredom shift into loneliness, frustration shift into anger at the inability to sleep that separated me from everybody else. My aunt and uncle didn’t empathize so much as arrange things so I wouldn’t be a nuisance (hence the cookies, the comic books). They seemed disappointed. They didn’t understand why I couldn’t sleep like a normal kid. Neither did I.