eventually, insomnia, my love.

In my golden memories of late-childhood I recall sleeping. I slept the deep bone-sleep of the child who spent days perfecting handstands between eating rounds of white-bread sandwiches washed down with milo.  I slept listening to 3XY radio and  I slept with the dropped book squished somewhere against my hot little body. 

Then in the mornings, once I’d been good and earned my reading-rights by getting up for breakfast, washing myself and doing a house-work job like dusting with an old singlet of Dad’s, I’d be allowed to go back to my room, to sleep-read, which is possibly the most delicious sensation I know—pages are read, face drops onto arm or pillow, wake, read more, drop off dreaming the next part of the story…

I don’t sleep like that now, not with that heavy sense of ease and rightfulness.  These days I doubt sleep, and perhaps knowing this sleep in turn is skittish with me, thin like the meanness of dieting, jumpy like a new love, uncertain and fleet of foot.

And yet, and yet… my body gets tired but I love what night-wakefulness can do If I let it.  There is no fight sometimes against 3am, no fight and no hope-for-sleep and no anything so sometimes I simply mediate a huge blue flower across the dark expanse of my forehead.  Sometimes I get up from the kicked sheets and beaten pillow, and these times are sublime.

There is the night being washed.   Who is doing this washing, how does it happen always this way?  The utter clarity in the chill air, my toes scrunching on the warmer greyed-wood of the deck, and the possums have stilled in my presence.  Night-flower-scent, delicate, moreso than under the sun of daytime.  Jasmine and honeysuckle and the gorgeous sexiness of orange roses.

Or 5am, my mind yearning towards coffee and the sharpening into day, perhaps I do some words or read.  I go again to the back veranda to sail in a brief dream-burst upon tiny wooden boats silhouetted on a sky that is striated pink-- a mobile that takes me briefly into fantasies of the spice isles, where I lurch against rigging as my grin splits my face in two and my lips catch salt-spume.

Eventually, in insomnia, I wonder why I would sleep when there are waking dreams?