The Collapse CLXXI: Insomnia

01 October 20XX+1

My Dear Lucilius:

Insomnia. It comes for us all.

My insomnia started well before The Collapse, a remnant of a career that never seemed to provoke massive amounts of stress but also never was completely stress free. Then, it was just an annoying outgrowth of work and concerns I could never really rid myself of.

Sunday nights before the work week were the worst. I would inevitably wake up sometime around 0200 – well before my actual rising time – and just lay there in bed. There was always a two minute window where, if I could manage to quiet my mind, I could easily make my way back to sleep. But if that window passed, I was easily up for two hours or more. And then, of course, spent the rest of the week catching up on sleep.

The habit, once made, seemed impossible to be rid of, and so it simply became a way of life. At best I could exhaust myself into sleep; at worst I went around for days on the edge of zombiehood, prone to almost falling asleep in meetings if given a chance.

I had quite forgotten that was a thing – until my marriage some months ago. Suddenly I was reminded that we do not all suffer from insomnia, and being in a small living location makes it all the worse. Now, I try and ease my way off the bed and come to the living room where I mostly sit in darkness and look out the window or, if I am feeling lucky, try to lay on the futon to sleep.

The stove is certainly warm enough in Winter to make it a pleasant experience of course, but given the proximity of the bedroom to the living room – literally a door away – any chance of doing anything other than sitting or lying down is at the risk of waking up Pompeia Paulina.

Sitting on the futon against the back wall, I can look out the side windows (once I open the curtains, of course) or even get a view out the window above the sink in the kitchen. There is not much to see usually – even before everything happened this was a quiet burg with little going on after the sun went down. Now with life at the pace of sun and moon, there is even less.

If I stand at the sink and look out, I can see across the pasture to the main road out of town. It looks ghostly on moonlit nights, the rays picking up the imperfections of the pavement and the trees on the other side of the road as silent dark sentinels, brooding under starlit skies. The windows on the dirt road from the living room are at least more personable, looking out over our log fence that keeps nothing out but sightseers at one time to the dip beyond the road hiding the creek, brush and reeds indicating its perimeter by their presence. These, too, glow in the night but are even more ethereal when lit by moonlight and blowing in the wind.

I could, I suppose, meander out to the greenhouse and sit, even taking a headlamp to read – but that defeats the purpose of me attempting, vainly, to pretend that somehow just by sitting or lying here I will go back to sleep.

On my better nights I make lists of things to do. Sometimes, I just sit with my memories.

The silence in the house is much less noticeable than the silence outside, mostly because the house was almost always silent when it was just me living here. The silence outside often seems more menacing to me, a sort of melancholy reminder of times past that very well may be gone forever.

Outside, the reeds and brush begin to move with a breeze under the almost past full moon that I cannot hear but only see.

Your Obedient Servant, Seneca