I Am Done With My Graceless Heart
Jan. 7th, 2012 04:43 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
catvalenteNow that I’m on sleep meds, I have to confront this other problem with my soul. Even given the ability to regulate my sleep with no side effects, I’ll stay up until 4:30 in the morning voluntarily. Even fight sleep.
Why? I don’t know. These hours have been mine my whole life, mine and no one else’s, as I seem to solely date and marry people who can fall asleep instantly and stay asleep with no trouble, and also who need to be up early in the morning. So my whole being thinks they belong to me, they are precious hours when I am alone and myself.
And there comes a moment, every night I stay up, when I feel quickened and awake and real, I feel on the verge of some epiphany, some starry apotheosis that I can never quite realize. But if I could only stay up another hour, surely, then I would…I don’t know. Transform.
Usually this is when I start to listen to melancholy indie music and/or bombastic music that makes me want to seethe and leap high and become–but I grasp at nothing in the dark and come away with only wistfulness and a completely upended circadian rhythm. I don’t want to stay up late. (Well, I do, but I also want to get up early.)
But that feeling comes and I chase it and never catch it.
It’s 4:30. I have Shake It Out on repeat. Sitting in bed in the dark winter of the night. I wish someone were awake with me. But the epiphany–oh my god, it is Epiphany, isn’t it? Right now, tonight, since I haven’t gone to bed yet. How strange. The epiphany never comes, it just crackles along my skin and it’s probably stupid chemicals firing for no reason, but it never comes so what would I say to someone who could, like the fairy tale task, stay up all night with me?
The night is another country. Half of me lives there.
Mirrored from cmv.com. Also appearing on @LJ and @DW. Read anywhere, comment anywhere.
Nap
Date: 2012-01-07 07:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-08 12:05 am (UTC)Why? I don’t know. These hours have been mine my whole life, mine and no one else’s, as I seem to solely date and marry people who can fall asleep instantly and stay asleep with no trouble, and also who need to be up early in the morning. So my whole being thinks they belong to me, they are precious hours when I am alone and myself.
You say you don't know, but then you explain yourself clearly. You do this to put distance between yourself and others.
Timeshifting is a seductive habit. It gives one a feeling of being hallowed, apart from the world. The chosen solitude of the hermit, the ancorite, the visionary, the lone traveler in a new land---those night hours watching alone have all the appeal of that kind of specialness. The chemicals of tiredness that build up in the brain add a significance, an immanence, to thoughts and actions. But it's a destructive habit, tearing the hours out of the night and brooding over them and waiting for revelations from them. You aren't going to transform, not in a way you'll like afterwards. Nobody ever has done.
The Piper doesn't come when called, no matter how hard you wish.
There are times, yes, when staying up all night and seeing the dawn in is a good thing and the right thing to do. But to do it habitually, often, with no gain from it---you do not write that your most productive hours are these night hours (I know people who are true night owls, and they do not speak of the night as you do)---that is a kind of junk food of experience.
There is a tension between living with others and living alone, for all people, and to deliberately shift your clock away from those you live with is to live alone. It is an act of privileged abandonment, leaving them behind, to assert that you have this liberty and to take it in front of those who cannot do so (even if they would). Choose it if you wish to do so, if you sincerely wish for that, but don't pretend it's happening accidentally.
Try reserving waking nights for great occasions, for Midsummer and true passion and sickness and deathwatches, and share them. Then you will know what you will say to others, and you will learn what they will say to you.