If it's 3 a.m., I must be an alien

It's been hot this summer, even at night, so I wake up more than usual.

When I can't sleep, I focus on my breathing, as if I were meditating, even though I don't meditate otherwise, or I inhale for a few seconds and hold my breath for a few seconds and exhale for a few seconds, over and over again, or I count back from a hundred until I reach zero, and sometimes I continue on below zero, or I try some fancy new technique like cognitive shuffling, where I think of an emotionally neutral word like PLANET and then come up with as many words that start with P as I can, and then as many words that start with L as I can, until I finally make it to T and still haven't fallen asleep, so I get up, go to the bathroom, drink a glass of water, check my phone for messages, read through my junk mail, scan the news, scroll through reels, and start all over again until it's morning.

Sometimes I'll fall asleep for an hour or so, dream that I'm an alien from a faraway planet, and when I wake up, I'm sure I haven't slept at all, until I remember dreaming of myself as an alien, and I try to will myself back into a dream so I can sleep again, so I don't have to toss and turn, a different dream where I'm not an alien, but that never works.

The smoke alarms have made matters worse.

Every night at exactly 3 a.m., all the smoke alarms in the house start chirping, because their batteries are low. We have a big house, so it takes a long time to walk up and down the stairs to every room, to replace the batteries, or to reset the smoke alarms because they're malfunctioning, because their batteries aren't actually low, they just think they are.

I say it's our house because my wife and I bought it twenty years ago, when the market was low, and we've lived here ever since. It's the only house we've ever lived in. We didn't think we'd like the neighborhood at first, because of the neighbors, but the house is surrounded by tall trees that don't lose their leaves in the winter, so it's hard for the neighbors to look through our windows and see what we're doing, especially at night, when it's dark and the lights are off. Even when the smoke alarms go off at 3 a.m., I don't turn on the lights, I just stumble up and down the stairs and feel my way around, but it's not as tricky as it sounds, because I know where all the smoke alarms are by now.

Except one.

The other thing that makes matters worse is that my wife doesn't sleep in our bed anymore. When she slept next to me for all those years, I could sleep just fine. So could she. We'd wake up at the same time, make breakfast and putter around the house, and then we'd head outside onto our street and walk past our neighbors' houses, look in their windows and see what they were up to. We'd do this hand in hand, even if we had to run away, which wasn't as often as you might think, since we were pretty good at spying on our neighbors without them noticing. We'd go back to our house and write everything down, in our diaries of sorts, and we'd file everything away and make dinner and go to bed, where we'd fall asleep at the same time and sleep until morning.

We did that for all those years until the first time the smoke alarms started chirping at 3 a.m. My wife and I woke up at the same time and went through the house to replace the batteries or reset the alarms, but one alarm kept chirping and chirping and chirping, like some kind of insane bird. We couldn't find the annoying little chirper, so we went back to bed and tried to sleep, but my wife couldn't, so she got up to look for the smoke alarm we couldn't find, and I stayed in bed. She got angry that I stayed in bed, and I got angry that she got up in the middle of the night without me. That's not how we did things. But she insisted, and I could hear her going up and down, up and down the stairs, into the living room and the dining room and the kitchen and the basement, back up to the kitchen and the dining room and the library, up past the bedroom where I was trying to sleep and the guest rooms, the guest bathroom, up the stairs to the attic, where I could hear her calling my name and telling me to come upstairs, for hours, but I refused, because I wanted to go back to sleep.

The alarm kept chirping, my wife kept yelling down the stairs, begging me to come up, but all I wanted to do was sleep.

The next morning, my wife was gone.

And each night, the smoke alarms still go off at 3 a.m. and wake me up until I deactivate them, except the one I can't find, the one up in the attic. I've learned to ignore that one, through my attempts at meditation and cognitive shuffling and whatnot, but it's hard to mask the chirping entirely, especially since it's been getting louder and more insistent every night. Some nights, I worry it will wake up the neighbors and cause a scene, but I think I might be the only one in the neighborhood who can hear it. Even the dogs in the neighborhood sleep through it, so the frequency of the chirping must be out of their hearing range, too.

I've decided that not being able to sleep is one of the most human things I can do. Not being able to sleep tends to wear humans down, make it harder for them to function, physically and emotionally and cognitively, but I just grin and bear it. It's harder to do, without my wife, and sometimes, during the day, when I don't have to stumble around in the dark and when the smoke alarms aren't going off, I climb the stairs to the attic and stand in front of the door my wife went through that night at 3 a.m., or about an hour or two later, after calling me and calling me to join her, to walk through the door to where the alarm was chirping, because our time here was up, but I didn't join her, I didn't walk through the door, because I like it here and I don't want to leave.

And so I lie in bed every night, tossing and turning, dreaming I'm an alien, waking up again when the alarm goes off, telling me it's time, falling asleep again for a few minutes until I wake up again, and I do that all night, doing the most human thing I can do.