Don’t Go Back To Sleep

It’s not like she didn’t warn me.

I collapsed fully-clothed into bed at 8:30.

“You sure you wanna go to bed?” Abbi asked. “You haven’t been sleeping well.”

Sure enough, it’s nearly three o’clock on a Thursday morning, I’m wide awake, and have been for two hours.

Truth is that I’ve been sleeping just fine. In fact — Abbi’s adolescent, full-sized bed not withstanding — I slept like a baby while visiting her folks in Greenville, Delaware. Could have been all the local festivities, or the healthy dose of lager. More likely, though, it was the relative quiet of the Wilmington suburb, the principle soundtrack of which was the wind through the branches.

Back home in Hell’s Kitchen, though, the soundtrack is sizeably different.
This morning, a garbage truck idled amidst Tenth Avenue traffic just below our fifth floor window. In concert with a head full of worry over editing “Mister Rogers & Me” prior to our self-imposed March 15th Nantucket Film Festival deadline, the din was too much.

So here I am.

I’m sure it’s temporary. And luckily, the stakes are pretty low; I don’t really have to be on top of my game at work this week. Still, it’s kind of annoying to toss and turn for an hour, give in, get up, then wander around an empty apartment before collapsing into bed again just before sunrise.

On the upside, my early morning ideas are often my best, and online research has yielded some great resources for the film, so…

So I look at it as my unconscious saying, “Wake up! Pay attention!” yunno, like that Rumi poem about spirits on the edge of sleep.

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you; Don’t go back to sleep. You must ask for what you really want; Don’t go back to sleep. People are going back and forth across the doorsill where the two worlds touch. The door is round and open. Don’t go back to sleep.

For Heaven’s sake, don’t go back to sleep. (Though I’m about to.)