She visits in the night
12 October 2011 10:25 AM Categories: Insomnia
Restless, I woke at 3:37 this morning to a thump at my room door. At some point in the night, the dog had gone from my side to the blanket on the floor, but she was still asleep. I knew that the woman was eyeing me, just like I knew she was beside me last night before I dropped my book and turned off the light.
I’ve been reading about beauty and brutality, about the forces that make us who we are, about what it means to be human. It’s a mix of fact (the psychology of personality, though I think calling it “fact” may go too far) and fiction (The Bone People by New Zealand author Keri Hulme, a book so sad and violent and blurry with drink, child abuse, and self-pity that I’m not sure I can finish it, no matter how luscious the writing). Maybe the book influenced my night, reading that last scene of whiskies and beers and bottles of port all consumed before tea time, the prelude to broken glass and a blow to the head. I have lived in the drunken haze of a spring afternoon in a bar where day was night, but I have never beaten a child. I have never taken my displacement, my lack of connection, out on those weaker than I, at least not tangibly, my fist against their flesh.
Still, my poor sleep last night might have been for other reasons. The house could be haunted. Someone is watching me. My checkbook disappears and then shows up again days later in its rightful spot. I lose stuff, strange things, like bottles of shampoo and favorite pens. During the rains last week, the sheets of water rattling the skylights, I woke up to a door slam downstairs (it was the wind, the wind). When I slunk to the bathroom, I refused to look in the mirror for fear something else would look back, something I could only see in reflection, the spirit behind me, my shadow's opposite. The boy woke up in a panic, too, and we spent half the night in a cuddle, both of us scared for only slightly different reasons.
Shapes flow at the edge of my peripheral vision. I am not alone. I talk to the air and explain myself: Don’t watch me, I tell it, him, her: this isn’t me. I am somewhere else, inside my head, dancing on an empty stage, performing for no one but myself.
I didn’t go back to sleep this morning. The boy is home sick for the second day in a row (he is watching The Hobbit for the 20th time as I type across from him. I like to watch the emotions roll across his face like waves, his unfiltered reactions). Tomorrow my husband goes in for hernia surgery and I’m afraid that I will be home again with the boy, unable to support my husband at the surgical center and unable to be fully present at home.
When I don’t sleep, my outlook is bleak. I remind myself that it’s the insomnia talking, giving me guilt and worry, telling me that my luck is about to run out, that I don’t deserve a damn thing anyway, that the fates will figure it out soon enough. They will take away.
The woman sits in the room with us. Her knitting is loose and disorganized, her eyes glassy with lost memories. At night she sheds years. She wears black wool. Her long, dark hair gleams again. The woman visits each of us in our respective chambers, runs her hand along our frowsy sleeping heads. She stares at us until we stir, hoping to meet the eyes of the living one more time.
Image (from a Victorian ambrotype) by colodio.
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