And So It Begins Again

Another sleepless night Of waiting Waiting for deathly darkness To lift Waiting for the thoughts Of a future where there is none To fade Waiting for the pain that multiplies When laying still in the night To drop from 8 — or with fear from 10 — To 6 and tolerable Waiting for the thuds and thumps Of the upstairs neighbor Who has no dog To gear up Reassuring me That I am not the last — Not such a crazy thought in those deep hours when nothing else moves

Mostly I wait for the birds to begin singing Even though it’s far too soon for them As if they know I need their steady song To keep my heart in rhythm Though birds aren’t generally thought To be a good sign I can’t help but think mine are They sing so early each morning Hours before the sun Chirping, chirping Until black can no longer Hold onto its blackness They usher back The trees Their branches outlined On the backside of the cheap white blinds The magnolia blossom shadows Seem to float otherworldly Two stories up And In the horizontal gap left by a blind Cut a hair too short for the window The barest glint of water Which I can just make out But only in my mind’s eye

The first breath of morning Like the first breath drawn Since darkness took hold A million hours before

I wonder if I’ll ever be able to sleep at night again. I had this problem when I was very ill during my first couple of years in Chicago. I had SJS which is a horrific disease causing this skin to literally come off you in sheets. I was lucky as it only affected my hands and feet but after two visits to the ICU, countless shots of solumedrol followed by the IV version in the hospital (the only blessing here is that I’m so phobic of needles that IV’s are practically impossible for me to tolerate so they kept me pretty sedated to the point of knocking me out — probably more for their benefit than mine since no matter how empathic you are suffering through someone else’s full-fledged panic attack is not enjoyable) my system was so messed up I didn’t know up from down.

When you fear your life may be ending, sleep can become the enemy. It was more than two years before I was able to actually sleep when it was dark out. Instead, I generally worked through the night until it started to get light then sleep for a few hours. I had just started to get over that when COVID-19 struck.

Even when you don’t have severe symptoms, just knowing that you have it and there’s no cure makes you worry that things could still go bad any time, especially at night. After waking up feeling like I couldn’t breathe, my old patterns returned.

I used to love nighttime; it was my refuge and my private writing time. Of course, these days all times are my private times as I’m completely on my own out here. But even so, nighttime has once again become a time of threat for me. I almost never sleep before the sun comes up, and have found I often can’t sleep even then. I used to have maybe one or two nights a month that I couldn’t go to sleep at all. This is now up to 1–2 nights a week. When the sun gets up so do I.

Perhaps someday happiness will help me learn to sleep again. I wait eagerly for this possibility.

Natalie Frank has had her poetry featured in several anthologies including Untimely Frost. Her fiction has been published in Haunted Waters Press, Weirdbook Magazine, Siren’s Call Publications, Lycan Valley Press and Zero Fiction among others. Her collection of poetry, Disguised I Breathe, In Love I Hold, can be found on Amazon under her pen name, Taye Carrol.

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