insomniacs

In the wee hours when sleep eludes me, i like to go out of the house and down to the park. I have a taser that fits in my pocket so I don’t worry about late night lurkers. They lock the gates at seven p.m. so I have to climb over, which I can do in under fifteen seconds now.

Down under the willows right by the water, a little boy waits for me. His name is Ray, or so he says. He can’t sleep either. I don’t know how he gets into the park; he seems far too small to climb over the fence, but he’s here most nights and it’s nice not to be alone so I don’t pester him. We sit and listen to the water and the frogs, sometimes we tell stories. Not real ones, of course. Who would tell a stranger the truth?

Ray is a better storyteller than me, but I’m a better listener and I think that’s more important. If no one listened, stories wouldn’t have any magic left in them. He tells stories about the history of this lake and the woods behind us. He says there used to be water sprites that lived here and kept the water clean, that people would come from all over to taste its sweetness. Water isn’t sweet, I say. It is when it’s clean, Ray tells me.

After I’d been going to the park a while, I started to bring things with me. Two hot water bottles, a flask of tea, a bag of skittles, a pack of cards. The ground is damp but as long as we are awake why should it matter if we’re a little wet? There isn’t room in my backpack for a picnic blanket anyway. One time, Ray tells a ghost story and when I walk home that morning, I can see shadows everywhere and my hand never leaves my pocket, gripping that taser so tight I could crush it in half. No more ghost stories, I say the next night. You’re right, he laughs. Ghost stories are for people who know how to fall asleep.

When I go home, I can hear my family sleeping through the walls. Their sounds are low and deep, rhythmic like lapping waves.

Night sounds.

When you can’t sleep, you learn what the world sounds like after everyone’s gone to bed. The hum of the refrigerator, the whoosh of a car passing by, the faint chatter of crickets. I take off my boots, my socks, my trousers. I climb into bed and lie on my back and listen. I’m good at listening.

There is grey light outside but I’m not even afraid of it anymore. I’m just glad everyone will be awake again soon and I won’t be alone. It used to scare me when I was a little girl. I lay there exhausted, eyes full of tears from hours of tossing angrily. I’d missed my chance and it was time to get up again. I’d wished for just one more hour of darkness to try to sleep, but I’d hear footsteps and doors opening and the shower running and time getting away from me. At least now, there was Ray.

Why can’t you sleep, Ray? He always comes in his pyjamas, sometimes blue and white stripes and sometimes a grey t-shirt and plaid bottoms. He says that if he could wear pyjamas in the daytime he would. I get angry at night, he says. If I don’t move or speak or see anything, I start to think and thinking always leads to something bad. That’s not true. He looks at me and I realise that even though I spend more time with Ray than anyone, I don’t know the colour of his eyes or much about his face at all. He is just a little boy in pyjamas with messy hair. Why can’t you sleep then?

I looked out at the black blue line where the trees meet the sky and listen for the clay bell sound of the frogs. They are awfully quiet tonight. I don’t know, I say. I think I worry I’ll miss something.

Some nights, I don’t go to the park. I win over consciousness and sleep without dreaming for a few hours. But I always wake up too soon; before anyone else. On those early mornings, I wonder if Ray was under the willows by himself last night, lonely and cold without the hot water bottle I bring him. I wonder if he likes it when I’m not there so that he can have that magic lake to himself.

When I go back again he’s waiting and he says, you missed it. I saw a sprite. But he doesn’t smile, or at least I can’t see it if he does because he’s looking down at the water and its’ inky black at two a.m. I’ve sectioned off the hours into colours. Blue, purple, navy, black, lavender, pink, orange, and finally blue again. If I’d been asleep, how would I even know what those colours looked like filling the big cut out sky? I tell Ray about my colour/hour chart and he says I’ve forgotten grey.

It’s always a little bit grey, isn’t it, I whisper.

We don’t talk about who we are in the daytime because we don’t have to. We can be whoever we want down here in the park. We are brave pioneers, seeking out the secrets of the nocturnal plain. Ray is king of the sprites, and I can hear a raindrop fall in the savanna, a million miles away. It’s easy to believe in magic when the stars are above you and the wind is soft and you see the flash of a fox’s eyes in the brush. When Ray tells his stories, I believe them until the morning.

When I go back over the fence, up the street and into the house, it is a different world. The quiet is deafening. By the time everyone else is up, the magic has worn off. I don’t have any superpowers and I don’t know anything special or important. I’m just a sleepy grey girl with no zest for life, not a pinch of gusto to learn or connect.

I really must get some sleep tonight.