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There's a song by Counting Crows on their first album, titled "Perfect Blue Buildings." That album is one of a handful I've kept since my teenage years, one I listened to with my door closed against the inevitability of school the next morning, in my first apartment, in the car, on my CD player in Brno. This one song however is what I find myself listening to on sleepless, aching nights. Adam Duritz sings slowly, and every word feels like the truth in my bones.
Its 4:30 a.m. on a Tuesday
It doesn't get much worse than this
In beds in little rooms in buildings in the middle of these lives which are completely meaningless
Help me stay awake, I'm falling...
One of the things I do when I can't sleep is bake. I turn on the music and go to work in the kitchen, baking pies and cakes. One night when I was fifteen I baked the most beautiful, glossy strawberry pie I've ever made while listening to Lies by Guns 'N Roses over and over. Last night it was chocolate sponge cake with lingonberry jam and covered in chocolate frosting. I can't possibly eat all this food and I don't really want to, but it is a way to divide the endless terrible seconds into something bearable and sweet.
I hate to sleep. I've hated it for a long time, in different ways. It gets in the way of a thousand other things I could be doing. Mostly it is the getting into bed, the long dark before the fall, that I hate. In that time I have my worst panic attacks. Circles and circles of cold thoughts, of despair and nightmares and fear. Waves of futility pound at me until I cry into the mattress or try to stave them off by reciting multiplication tables to fifteen.
My paternal great-grandmother died when I was five. I remember my father in a dark suit, and being so angry that I couldn't go with him because I knew he would be seeing my grandparents. My parents gave me a book about death. The story centered around a young boy who sailed toy boats with his grandfather. What I remember most is reading the section in the back of the book written for parents trying to explain death to their children. It cautioned them not to equate death with sleep, as this might cause children to become afraid of bed time and the dark.
A few years later my parents gave me a clock radio. It had a button that would play the radio for fifty nine minutes and then shut off. I kept it at the head of my bed, and sometimes pushed the button two or three times before I went to sleep. In the late 1980s a band called Anything Box had a radio hit called "Living in Oblivion." I would hear it almost every night. It always made me cry, because I was so utterly afraid. Twenty years later, and I am still afraid of the dark, of sleep, of the unsettling imagery of lonely toy sailboats on small ponds rendered in watercolors.
Don't tell me now,
I won't feel those words, I won't feel the lies they tell
Can you hear my scream?
It's for everyone, for everyone...
I am so afraid of living in oblivion
Strange how you can hate sleep so much, and be so tortured by insomnia. I'm trying to kick my sleeping pill habit, because I think it can't be good for me and I'm tired of having to take so many drugs for so many things. They won't make the dark seem less meaningless, or render oblivion in more palatable terms. I just want to be able to lay down and fall asleep, without those agonizing hours in the dark.
Its 4:30 a.m. on a Tuesday
It doesn't get much worse than this
In beds in little rooms in buildings in the middle of these lives which are completely meaningless
Help me stay awake, I'm falling...
One of the things I do when I can't sleep is bake. I turn on the music and go to work in the kitchen, baking pies and cakes. One night when I was fifteen I baked the most beautiful, glossy strawberry pie I've ever made while listening to Lies by Guns 'N Roses over and over. Last night it was chocolate sponge cake with lingonberry jam and covered in chocolate frosting. I can't possibly eat all this food and I don't really want to, but it is a way to divide the endless terrible seconds into something bearable and sweet.
I hate to sleep. I've hated it for a long time, in different ways. It gets in the way of a thousand other things I could be doing. Mostly it is the getting into bed, the long dark before the fall, that I hate. In that time I have my worst panic attacks. Circles and circles of cold thoughts, of despair and nightmares and fear. Waves of futility pound at me until I cry into the mattress or try to stave them off by reciting multiplication tables to fifteen.
My paternal great-grandmother died when I was five. I remember my father in a dark suit, and being so angry that I couldn't go with him because I knew he would be seeing my grandparents. My parents gave me a book about death. The story centered around a young boy who sailed toy boats with his grandfather. What I remember most is reading the section in the back of the book written for parents trying to explain death to their children. It cautioned them not to equate death with sleep, as this might cause children to become afraid of bed time and the dark.
A few years later my parents gave me a clock radio. It had a button that would play the radio for fifty nine minutes and then shut off. I kept it at the head of my bed, and sometimes pushed the button two or three times before I went to sleep. In the late 1980s a band called Anything Box had a radio hit called "Living in Oblivion." I would hear it almost every night. It always made me cry, because I was so utterly afraid. Twenty years later, and I am still afraid of the dark, of sleep, of the unsettling imagery of lonely toy sailboats on small ponds rendered in watercolors.
Don't tell me now,
I won't feel those words, I won't feel the lies they tell
Can you hear my scream?
It's for everyone, for everyone...
I am so afraid of living in oblivion
Strange how you can hate sleep so much, and be so tortured by insomnia. I'm trying to kick my sleeping pill habit, because I think it can't be good for me and I'm tired of having to take so many drugs for so many things. They won't make the dark seem less meaningless, or render oblivion in more palatable terms. I just want to be able to lay down and fall asleep, without those agonizing hours in the dark.