9. 3AM

I wake now at 3AM in my cell. I don’t know that it is three, and I don’t really know that I am awake. The pillow is folded underneath my head, jammed into the crevice between my skull and my neck. I don’t know how it rolled down there, and I don’t think I fell asleep that way either. I hardly open my eyes before I close them again. I don’t want to wake up; maybe I will fall right back asleep. Maybe I won’t even notice this.

Did I realize that I was nearly as close to 60 as I am to 20?

No one wants me to help them. No one wants my help.

I am grateful that I don’t have an email account anymore, it would only be host to advertisements. The inbox would be empty but for automated funnels; daily mails sent on the hour to remind me of how useful someone is, was, could, be to me.

I roll over and decide to count my breaths instead, I try to pray when I inhale and on the exhalation. I last three breaths before I begin to think about my 20s. They feel lost, they feel that they were broken. I ended up here somehow, intact, and in place.

It makes me believe in providence, I don’t know how I would have made it under my own efforts. When I have the opportunity to break things, to walk away, to abandon, I do so. There is always a reason. Could I have abandoned this calling, could I have done something else? I don’t know. I think I fought for it, and I don’t think that I had any choice about it, either. Why did I fight for it, and why did I win? How did I get here?

Doesn’t make any sense, that.

Your body is only becoming more broken. What if you have arthritis now?

Come and eat, for this is my body and blood.

I read somewhere that the best thing to do if you wake up in the night and can’t fall back asleep is to read for a little bit, like 15 minutes, and then try to go back to sleep after that. But don’t read for too long.

This has worked for me when I have been lucky enough to close my eyes while reading without really noticing that I was closing them. I then make the sneaky transition of moving my book over to the back corner of my single bed and fall asleep before acknowledging the act.

What happens when you fall asleep? Where do the hours go? Do you think that your cell experiences those eight hours that pass you buy? Are we a part of those hours, where do they go with us? When someone watches you, checks up on you, does time also slow down for you in your sleep? Do you see time like the person watching you and the unbearable ticking of the clock? You are no long an observer, a reference point in time, I think, when you are sleeping. You are abandoned, only to be picked up again in the morning.

Apparently we also spend some of that time paralyzed. This I know, because I have woken up paralyzed at least a hundred times, surely. I never thought of counting.

Some once said it was because a devil was sitting on you. This paralysis can feel like a devil sitting on your chest and keeping you down. It does feel malevolent, it is true. For me it doesn’t happen on my back. Usually my arm is somehow trapped beneath me and my face is in the pillow. When I was a small child I use to feel like I was suffocating and might die. I wasn’t suffocating, but in a way I was hyperventilating, I am guessing. No, that doesn’t make sense. I think that I was probably panicking in my mind and my body wouldn’t respond. I couldn’t hyperventilate, even if I wanted to.

People get stuck like this some times. There was a teacher who knew someone like this. She lay in bed for hours to try to understand how it felt herself, to see if there was anything she could do to relieve the paralyzed’s discomfort.

I have gotten better at this over the decades, though, and I tend to not panic like I used to. I try to breathe calmly, and then I focus on my body. I can get it to rock off of the arm that is trapped underneath me. It’s not a fluid, simple motion, it take effort. It is like a boulder that I am rocking out of a rut, a car stuck in the snow. I have to do this and remain calm. I am blind I don’t think I hear anything, but I can feel and time passes. Eventually I manage to roll onto my back relieved, a swimmer taken under by the surf but the thrown up onto the sand in safety. Now I check to see how I lie before I try to sleep. No arms beneath me; lets avoid lying on our stomach, too.

I have also read that waking up at 3AM is entirely natural and something that we almost took for granted. An hour awake was normal back in the golden age. It was treated as good, practically. People would get up, make love, and just enjoy the moment. Imagine that.

I wish this was true but I am too tired to believe it. When I go back to sleep, it is not the sleep of sleep, it is the sleep of naps. Naps are crooked. Naps give you rest but ask for much in exchange. I once woke from a nap convinced that I had experienced a brief sensation of hell. That was remarkable and unexpected.

Thank God I am here.

I have also heard in a book that 3AM is the midnight of the soul. I don’t remember the author or the title. It was recommended by a friend, I think it is a sort of horror story; there are ghouls in balloons floating over the suburbs late in the evening. The book is a fantasy but that is a remarkable piece of truth that has stuck with me since, 15 years later

3AM is the midnight of the soul.

I woke, then I read, and now I am going back to sleep. I often wonder if I should get up, if I should live my life and not subject myself to the bile and other humors that seem so present within me. Do I invite this experience unwittingly?

The night, though, the night is dark and dreadful. When I do wake at three, if I do just get up and try to do something, then I am waiting for the sun to rise. The night is a tiny chamber filled with dark that binds. The day brings assurance and light, a distant horizon and life.

This calling, though, this place where I am is I am. It could not be any other way.

A knock on my door wakes me, it is morning. I am full of snot and heavy bones, I am not ready to get up. Splintered dreams and twisted marches of time fill my head and sinuses. I am awake and I live full beneath the covers. The door opens and the hallway light streams in, I smile. I invite them in and we talk. I eventually push the covers off of me and swivel my feet to the floor. I stand up, and we go out to the hall. All is left behind in the dark.

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