Between the click of the light and the start of the dream
When I was a kid, it took me forever to fall asleep. Unlike now when I happily doze for nine or ten hours at a time, I hated sleeping. I would lie in my bed and look around at my room, all my belongings, categorizing everything as I tried to relax. I counted sheep, sang songs to myself, made up stories, watched tv. Nothing worked. I pulled the covers up to my chin and started thinking.
There was something about night time that was simultaneously terrifying and exhilarating. I was scared of Beetlejuice and alligators and every night as I was desperately trying to sleep, I would imagine Beetlejuice reaching from under my bed (that’s where he lived, of course) and pulling me down into the dark belly of the Underworld to make me his bride in a red wedding dress. Obviously, I had read too much Greek mythology even as a kid and imagined myself to be Persephone eating her pomegranate seeds and whatnot down in Hades. I imagined worms crawling out from under his dirty suit as he tried to kiss me. This was, of course, all happening as we were surrounded by hungry alligators. I was a nervous kid.
When these thoughts started to consume me, I’d rub my eyes really hard. I laid on my back and rubbed my eyes hard, the delicate skin of my eyelids pressing against my eyeballs until I saw every color imaginable. It looked like swirls of dark purple and gold, a more heightened version of the slides of galaxies that I had seen at science museums. I felt like I was floating through my own private portal to the Milky Way, my arms pushing stars and tiny planets out of the way as I kicked my legs. With my eyes closed, there was plenty of air to breathe in space and I took deep breaths as I moved through the galaxy behind my eyes.
I would rub my eyes with my small palms for what seemed like ages until I would open my eyes finally and see a burst of tiny spots of light in my line of vision. It was beautiful. It felt like my secret light show, my prize for staying up longer than kids were supposed to. I would stare until the lights disappeared and the only thing I could see was my night light in the corner.
I started to think again. My mind was and is always working but at night, it became a net for all of the worst possible thoughts. I thought about my parents dying, my dog who had died when I was younger, math tests, how awkward I felt in my body that got taller everyday, who I would sit with at lunch, whether I would go to a cool classmate’s birthday party, how many fouetté turns I could do in my audition for The Nutcracker, what was going to happen to me in my life. The worst thoughts were when I got to thinking about existence. Why am I here? Do I exist at all? What am I? I would stare at my hands in the dark and wonder if I was just a creation of some other mind, a small piece of a huge puzzle. I’d think myself into a corner until I finally, finally collapsed asleep.
Sleep is easier now, maybe life is more tiring when you’re an adult. The worries are bigger at the very least. Now I worry about getting into grad school, whether I’ll have kids someday, what kind of person I’m going to end up with, what the economy will be like in a few months, the anxiety of having to call people I don’t know, whether my friends and I will stay as close as we are, whether I’m making the wrong choices and fucking up my life. I can’t even devote enough time to these as I should for proper worrying. I’m just tired. I get into bed at night and I black out as soon as my head hits the pillow. I just think all day long now, small amounts of worry piled into a full day. I don’t know if those thoughts ever leave an overactive mind; it’s hard to shut off. It’s hard to know what to worry about sometimes.
I rub my eyes in bed and the stars fall into my hands; shimmering swirls of charcoal mascara and metallic olive and eggplant eyeshadow smudges stay on my fingers as I watch the light show and wish I was only worrying whether or not to sit with Jennifer Healy at lunch. My hands are as full as my mind.
