sleeping heart

sleeping heart

I can’t seem to fall asleep these days. my mind wanders and stays restless,
approaching 3 or 4 am nightly in a pattern of energy I can’t quiet or still. it’s
troublesome. persistent bouts of rain. I see the clock strike 11pm and feel a sense
that the day is just beginning. here feels like a good place to start. my mind is
more convincing than my body, so I lose when I win. I have forgotten (but not
forgiven) time.  

in the film all about lily chou-chou, you often can’t tell dream states from reality,
both mediated by the lullaby that is lily’s spectral voice. in truth they are both
nightmares. last year I experienced sleep paralysis for the first time. I was in a
hotel in Jaipur, in a room besotted by gem-colored stained glass windows that
bled warmly onto the ceiling. I was terrified, then I opened my eyes. terror, then
beauty this time. the rupture felt ideophonic, like when a word evokes some idea
of action or sound, movement or color, or when a word imitates a sensation. think,
“glimmer” or “twinkle.” sleep paralysis feels like sleep paralysis to me, but I’m
no expert on the unconscious, clearly.  

“there’s a dream I have in which I love the world,” wrote the poet Cameron
Awkward-Rich. there’s a dream I have in which I finally go to sleep. I’d like to be
woken from neither, but I don’t want to be dead. not anymore, and not yet. I text
Nikita so like how would you define insomnia and she says probably not sleeping.
that’s right, thank you. this is funny bc I had a dream about you yesterday, she
continues. you and I were having a slumber party and you were coming with me to
the gym in the morning but then in the morning we were like we CANNOT go we
are TOO tired / but then for some reason I couldn’t text the trainer so I had to
keep trying to write her a note / and then for some reason I ate the note and tried
to take a photo of it inside my body / but then it was just this really wet looking
photo of my organs. even in dreams, we're too tired. our excuses are grotesque and
illegible, even to us.

it reminds me of a 纸钱 burning workshop I went to in june, where death and
mourning were considered through the lens of Chinese paper effigy traditions. the
instructor had us build intricate glossy paper mansions, a pedicab, and a tennis
shoe——with matching socks——all to be burnt for those who had passed before us to
enjoy in their eternal, great beyond. the thing that stayed with me from that
presentation was that you could also burn paper medicine, a paper convenience
store, and even a paper massage chair for your beloved ghosts. were they still
getting headaches in the afterlife? 

according to traditional Chinese medicine, 11pm begins the portal when 气
moves through your gallbladder to support tissue repair and cellular renewal.
emotionally speaking, this is when our bodies process decisions, release
accumulated stress, and help us clear out the daily debris that’s built up
throughout the day. if you fall asleep after 1am, you’re metabolically less able to
process anger, frustrations, resentments. perhaps the six months of bad sleep is
catching up to me. I am angry at my decision to have let it go on for this long. it’s
frustrating, and I resent it.

my dreams don’t come through as clearly as they used to. I haven’t seen you in
any since july. two weeks ago, I lost my drivers license. last weekend, I lost my
favorite coat. I didn’t notice the absence of either for days. your memory bank is
not banking memories, Sophia tells me, the genuine worry on her face animating
pixels on my phone. it hadn’t occurred to me that I might not be totally awake
when I’m awake now, but it’s starting to.

the good news, and the challenging thing, is that there are things that I’m finally
dreaming about. things that I can feel. things that take up all my time now, and
happily. it turns out I’ll sacrifice a lot of sleep to sit in a cold room in an old
townhouse on 10th street, talking for hours and hours about secrets and language.
when waking life supersedes dreaming, when the living with words and
impossible sounds is so lovely, sleep feels secondary, tertiary, maybe even
octonary. like I said, my mind is more convincing than my body. that’s entirely the
problem.

in lily’s song “ether,” she sings: in the days of reality, my broken, sleeping heart /
if it’s touched / that ether / will revive / revive. as I write this it’s 2:55 am. there
aren’t clocks where you are now. hopefully, no headaches either. I dream that
you’re finally sleeping——real, reviving hours. when I wake up, you’ll still be gone.
I hope one day to be conscious, to forgive that. lily croons, in this wonderful
everyday life, in this wonderful world / it connects somewhere / that ether /
overflowing. I’d like to connect to somewhere soon, through the ether. where
dreams are good enough to live inside of and toward. to overflow into a softer
sleep.