So, I've been an insomniac for months. I mean, more than normal. More than usual. I've always been a night owl. Although I like sleep as much as the next neurotic depressive, it eludes me.
Thirty six hours of wakefulness have become the norm. Though I find it increasingly hard to concentrate on anything - anything social, or work related - lets face it, to many of us time ceased to have any appreciable meaning during the first lockdown. But still I have this... idea, that one day I will crack the code. That I will hit upon the one true way to turn myself off.
Look, this isn't about all the things I have tried. I get it - screens are bad. Cocoa is good. Caffeine is bad. No, this post isn't about that at all, or the difficulty manty of us with poor mental health have in this department. Happy to compare notes at a later date fellow insomniacs.
No. This is not about that.
So, the last few days I've wondered if forcing myself awake earlier and earlier might solve the issue. It's common to let people who suffer from poor mental health have enough rope. It's better in many ways to let folks who are used to their natural ups and downs to steer their own course via what ever forms of self support they know works for them. Sleep during the day, wake at night, medicate with Fallout 4 - which I continually start and mod and mod and start over and over again, looking to the perfect combination of hardcore difficulty that makes the game so immersive I cease to be real.
And so, I've forced myself to get up. Even though I went to bed at five and lay awake until seven I forced myself awake for ten. The first few days I was shattered, but tonight I found myself starting to get tired. Starting to drop off, but without being my usual state of physical and mental exhaustion at which point my brain closes down. This felt good, more natural.
What can I say? I'm body hacking again. Like William Hurd in Altered States. Maybe I'll find the thing - that thing that makes me relevant again.
Real.
Tired by one thirty. Of course, I'm an insomniac, so tired doesn't really cut it for me. But I'm in bed by two forty five. The wife sleeping soundly next to me. The dog at our feet like a married couple on a gothic sarcophagus. I am naturally still checking my phone, reading the Guardian, checking the mail, catching up on the world news. Being a retailer in lockdown is like being a polar explorer, ship trapped in the creaking ice. Retail is like being a shark - you have to constantly keep swimming forwards to stay relevant, have to keep up with new releases, with pre-orders, with events, but half of that hasn't been relevant for some time.
Three o'clock. This is the first time in months I haven't been wide awake at three o'clock, making toast or killing supermutants. Phone under pillow. Darkness. Silence. Peace.
And then I hear it.
Forty six minutes have passed and I still have no idea what it was. What it presumably is. Or where. The sound appeared to be a gnawing, outside, above the window. We're a detached house, in its own garden. We don't have mice, we don't have rats. I have had the misfortune to have been sleep deprived of both in my time. When I was ten I once woke up to find a rat sat on the foot of my bed, and I've never forgotten it. Never forgotten the sound rodents make as they scuttle in the rafters.
This was not that. This was more frantic, like a creature trapped. But what?
I have had a bird fly down a blocked off chimney. Broken through a flue in a futile attempt to save it. But there is no flue. Its window, with a lintel, and the walls are lintels are solid Yorkshire stone, hundreds of years old. There are no means of entry or egress. And I've never heard the noise before tonight.
I went to check outside. Once a lifetime ago, I stayed in a cottage in the fields. It had been recently converted, and the windows fixed in place with traditional putty that very day. Turns out certain birds love putty. tap, tap, tap all night, a flurry of feathers and beaks. At the time we were mystified - and awake. And pretty much in a state of terror, in the middle of nowhere. Straw Dogs country.
But there is nothing. Though the sound inside is now louder. The wife is awake now, and mercifully she can hear it too. She thinks its rain - sometimes the rain tap taps on the gas box outside the window, but no. The sky is clear and now she is creeped out too.
I go upstairs to my son's room. Under the windows there is a piece of panelling. Untouched - no holes or gaps. The skirting is flush everywhere - its been like that for six years. I tap, once, on the panel.
The noise stops.
It hasn't restarted yet. Mice and rats will resume once the coast is clear. They think you have forgotten, but you haven't. You lie awake expecting it.
I once dated a girl who ground her teeth. The first night she stayed over I kept jumping out of bed, having heard something. Waking her up, she heard nothing. How we laughed about it the next morning after I'd spent the night hammering at the walls.
The problem is, once you hear it you cannot unhear it. It preys on you. How can I sleep through alarms and kids getting ready for school, and kids coming back from school and cars and deliveries and phone calls and yet pick out that one thing nobody else can hear when nobody else can hear it.
I guess that's a bigger mystery.
At ten to three I was almost asleep, before three for the first time in six months. Even when I power through 36 hours straight I'm usually still awake at four. But hey, almost is half the battle. And now I'm wide awake. So wide awake. Old houses make noises. Like insomnia, you get used to it.
But not this.
That this should happen at the exact moment I needed it not to happen? It turns out googling "Am I already dead and in Hell" does not yield useful answers either. So much for the bloody internet.
So here's to you, my fellow insomniacs and Americans. May all your mysteries be solved in the morning light.