I had my insomnia, my ugly cries on the hard composite plat of the front stoop beneath the jab of 3 a.m. stars. Stars so bright they wouldn’t allow me what I wanted.
I had the hours I could not manage into their component parts—fast then never slow, of the mind but not free of it.
*
At the end of his life, through the cage of quarantine, my father slept. With the windows wide for sun and an aide sitting near in a chair. You have come, he would say, aide-ward, and then he’d sleep. Lie upon the raft of his bed, tilt his head, and breathe until the unbearable racket of his unconscious self could be heard through the slightly open door and down the hall of Personal Care. Needing someone near so that he would not drift all the way to nowhere, nothing. You have come and now I’ll sleep, he’d say, safe beneath the watch of the sun and the aide, who was tapping into her phone, now folding laundry, now answering to the ring when I called.
Can I speak to my father?
He is sleeping.
As if he could negate all the years of his own insomnia with a year of sleep at the end. As if, protected and defended, he could sleep, and I could ask him nothing.
*
I am learning to sleep. I am putting my head down to it. Two pillows, one a circle and thin, one long and fat. Sometimes together. Sometimes uncoupled. I have trouble knowing where to put my thoughts. How to chase the siren flare of myself straight out of myself so that I might find my zero.
I practice the wish-wash sound of the sea.
I practice night not as dread but as drift.
A fox barks.
A bird sings.
A squirrel gallops across the roof overhead. I can’t tell what it is chasing.
*
On the night my father died, they called me. After all those quarantine months they let me see him. It was about to storm and late. My husband drove the Wrangler over tipping roads, through caution lights, down the long dangerous curve, into the parking lot, and braked. I ran the halls of Personal Care. I ran toward the racket of my father’s breathing, a racket so ferocious that when I reached him he couldn’t hear me.
The lights were blare above him. The bed was shorn of sheets. The air was foam and burble, not the wish-wash of the sea.
Dying is not sleeping.
Dying is active until dying stops itself, stops being.
*
They say you should count, but math doesn’t sway me.
*
Sometimes I sail straight past sleep in my wish-wash sea and float and there he’ll be: my father. I see him, and I’m running.
*
This is how we go on, when we love as we do—all the way to nowhere, nothing.
Grey Sparrow Journal 