Quicksand

Sleep seems foreign and elusive of late. My body’s refusal to tune out, to quiet down, to let go of stimulus, attention and to rest – very much against my will has been draining. As if time has become flat, I have resisted its shift between night and day. My body has grabbed on to the instinct to remain vigilant even as the earth turns away from the sun. My mind takes leave and I am left with my restless arms and legs to deal with. Thirty-five pullups I think will pull my joints out of this mad midnight frenzy. The lights are out, and with my eyes fully dilated I start into the empty space between myself and the ceiling. I turn to the memory of tropical rain and the scent of the earth – of mud; of grass – within an app on my phone. And I can almost smell home if I shut my eyes and turn to cover myself with my blankets under the constructed deluge. I fear the memory slipping away unnoticed and one day I will have this feeling of something I no longer remember.

Switching on the lights, I turn to my journal and attempt to give shape and words to certain questions of hope, of love, of loss. I am only beginning to understand these even as my words fall short. I stop. Words seem not to take me any farther away from my predicament. I turn to Senghor: “Children of such short memory, what did the koras sing to you?” and grab on to the way he comes so close to the mysterious and perhaps I can go where he is taking me. My notes have been a way to record yet I seem not to find a thread to pull from among them. All the pains of this world – small, large, personal, communal – have relevance, I write. Some more time passes, and I know more words are taking too long to be found so maybe I can stop and listen to someone else but myself.

Krista asks questions that I know I have a stake in. And I lean in. What is my position in the dysfunction and construction of hope, of love, of loss? I set the sleep timer to half an hour, press my eyelids against each other and gaze into what’s left undone, into my untamed inattention to all the issues and I drift off into the quicksand.