Witching hour

Witching hour

11pm

It’s early still, for an insomniac. And even more so for those of us who are nocturnal. A club I’m proud to belong to. The milieu of artists and shift-workers and club-hoppers. And bats. Unlike the matutinal, with their morning greetings that batter us sleepyheads with forced bonhomie, when all you can do is grunt in response and hope they’ll get the hint and jog off into morning revelry.

12am

Perfect time for reading. My night-time material is curated. Nothing too rousing. Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything had me up for two days nonstop, my brain cracked open and high as crack. Nothing too high-quality, either. If I’m too awestruck, I’ll be sitting up, pasting quotes and annotating in my head, mental snail scribbles stealing me from bed. Nothing too gory, too, or it will seep into my sleep and creep into an equilibrium I work too damn hard to gain, with daily meditation and sugar-free, caffeine free everything to calibrate my naturally nervous state.

1am

Speaking of… Meditation might do the trick. Om Namah Shivaya. Om Namah Shivaya. Om Namah Shivaya. Thirty minutes. No clock set. Hopefully, it will segue me to sleep. The words lull me: God’s lullaby. The landscape behind my eyes turns Vantablack. Velvety. My favourite place to be. The problem is, I get so excited about my meditations that it perks me up. Ready to take on the world. Or the world-less world. The one that says it’s all an illusion, as if the universe were a magic trick. Does that make us humans the dupes?

2am

TV is not recommended. But if it’s soporific enough, it might work. In the evening, I have great taste, aided by the Golden Age of television. But overnight, it needs to be as chock with sugar and saccharine and happily ever afters as can be. Gilmore Girls is number one, but the writing’s so sharp it can point me to daytime. Good Witch so bad it’s great. An anodyne for the rising fear that darkness ushers in. I used to love the dark, a cape for creativity. But in the past decade, it has a connotation I can’t forget. Turning cape to hooded robe.

3am

The seesaw hour. It could go either way. An all-nighter threatens, taunting a little, showing me who’s boss. He’s the big-kid-bully who lurks round corners to grab at you when no one’s looking. But I’m smart. I can outwit him. ‘Do your best. I don’t need sleep. I can work/drive/think/remember just as well without it,’ I lie. The bully’s no dummy and laughs in my face. I try a podcast. Armchair Expert a favourite for going deep, insecurities and vulnerabilities on display like cute T-shirts on the washing line, making me feel less alone, less imperfect; more, compatibly imperfect. But sometimes they laugh too loud just as I’m nodding off and I have to start again.

4am

The witching hour. The time ten years ago the call came through from the hospital where Dad lay in a bed too small for his six-foot-three-ness, like a bad reboot of Goldilocks. Where he probably shivered under their limp holey yellow blankets, parsimonious with their warmth. Where his heart erupted, and the one thought has forever-after corrupted my brain with, if they had only let us stay, he wouldn’t have died alone. And, now, when time is undecided between morning and night, the other thought: We might have been able to save him. Which renders nights a landmine since, as I fear I’ll follow suit, stolen in the dark from a humming-happy life. I was his genetic mimetic, Daddy’s girl, a mini-me – our love of art and books and movies our bond – but what if our similarities dispatch me the same way, the same time: one of the nastier tricks of DNA?

5am

Crepuscular smudges, casual strokes of charcoal, tell me day has won. Which makes me something starting with L. But I’m alive, sleep-deprived, yes, but happy to still be here. Now I can let sleep come, as if she were a lover, a delivery, a day, a baby. It’s irrational, though. Most deaths occur in the morning. Exertions pushing an ailing body. So, I should be getting the jitters now, not all night. But the mind is a bendy thing, sometimes compliant and logical, sometimes a hyper acrobat. I’m sure it’s primal. Our ancestors safer in the light, less at risk of predator making prey of those burrito-ed in the oblivion of sleep.

6am

I drift off with an audiobook in my ear, but jolt awake half an hour later, as the neighbours bustle into their day. They belong to that morning gang, the ones who speak a language I can’t bear, all shrill and thrilled to be jogging and coffee-ing and chit-chatting and heading into the rush-crush of peak-hour traffic and the static electricity of the masses on their way.

7am

Once they leave, and the remaining neighbours, retired or quiet, don’t disturb, I pop back my eye mask, my earbuds – though that’s the limit to orifices I choose to block – and surrender this time with ease. The audiobook – a village cosy romance, melatonin for my mind filled with meet-cutes and enemies to lovers and quirky sidekicks and crusty curmudgeons and peculiar geriatrics and puppies and moggies and chooks and often a duck – is the perfect gateway to easy dreams.

8am

My dog has an itch he can scratch, and does, bouncing the bed as if he’s conducting electricity. It hasn’t even been an hour of respite. Should I give up? Get up? Exercise? Shower? I’m on afternoon shift today, so I could try to fall back asleep still. But at what point does the algorithm of trying versus succeeding calculate as wasting your whole life?

9am

I’ve decided to exorcise the sleeplessness by holding a mirror to it. Writing of its hold, like supervillain talons, on me. The irony is that the fear of death since Dad died pushes me closer to it. We’ve all read the stats on the perilous effects of sleep deprivation. But writing might counter that gloomy forecast and perform a conjuring trick, like abracadabra, a linguistic feat, to rock me into sleep.