Oh My God, It's All Around

It’s getting late, and tonight I don’t have many happy things with which to occupy my mind while I wait for sleep. I take an ambien, knowing I will still have to endure a few more hours of wakeful thoughts before it finally makes me tired enough for my mind to shut up. Oh, I don’t want to wait those dark, quiet, lonely hours after everyone else has gone to sleep...
I’ve always been slightly wary of sleeping pills, like taking them is flirting with suicide. But I know it isn’t. I also know that one pill hasn’t been working lately, and tonight I really, really want to fall asleep quickly. Hesitantly, I slip another pill from the bottle. I break it in half, pretend the halves are even. But I know I swallowed the bigger one.

I’ve been waking up with these weird bruises the last few days. Some of them are small—maybe the size of quarters—but some of them are a bigger—about half the size of my palm. They are deep blotches of sullen blue and green, accented by angry red scrapes in the middle. In the morning I see them and I can’t remember getting them, which throws me off a little. Surely I’d remember how I got those three large ones; they look like they’d have hurt. But I don’t remember.

I know sometimes I do or say strange things under the influence of ambien if I don’t go right to sleep. Often times, a vague feeling of remembrance catches up with me and, though it feels more like a fleeting dream than a memory, I can at least be fairly certain that whatever I did was not too crazy.

But I am also certain that I have done and said things on ambien that I have absolutely no memory of, even when seeing the evidence of the event the next day. Usually, I journal between taking the pill and falling asleep, and I’ve grown accustomed to reaching for my journal first thing in the morning to see what odd things I wrote the night before. Some are amusing, like “and—wow, for just a second there I totally thought I was a goat”.

But some are eerie, like one of the first entries I found. It was before I knew ambien’s effects, so it frightened me a little. “God, help me not be afraid of the dark; the doors are locked the doors are locked”. I write strange things, sometimes I go on and on, and I don't remember writing them at all. Dig in my brain, searching for that vague feeling of familiarity, but it just isn't there.

So the bruises could be explained by nightly escapades I am taking, but promptly forget. But if that were the case, wouldn’t I at least have a vague memory of one of the nights? I don’t know; maybe not. Maybe I am sleepwalking.

I’ve never been a sleepwalker. When I was a child, I would wander wide-awake around the house while everyone else was asleep. I liked to sneak into my brother’s room and take his Game Boy. I'd get chocolates out of my mother’s hiding place, the sewing box in her closet, then slip down to the basement to sit with our Doberman puppies, Rocky and Sarah. I’d sit between their kennels, playing Super Mario World2 and singing to them, letting them lick the insides of the chocolate wrappers.

But when a spider scurried into a corner, or Rocky barked at some distant sound, I’d gather up my chocolate and Game Boy and run upstairs.
And I did have to run. I had to race the darkness, and the ghouls that inhabited each shadow. I would steel myself, hand poised above the light switch, and count down: Five, four, three, two, two and a half...run. Flip the switch off and sprint up the stairs—fourteen of them—throwing wild glances over my shoulder though I knew that monsters are invisible until they grab you. Sometimes I would trip on the thick carpet, and my heart would hammer in my ears and shh shh don’t scream or you’ll wake Mom and she’ll hide the chocolates somewhere else.

Once, I stepped on a rouge carpet staple. It was crooked and caught in my skin, tearing a long, rough cut. It was superficial, but enough of a wound that I tracked blood all the way back to my room so I had to explain my puppy-visit to my parents the next morning.

I left out the part about the chocolates.

This is still my time, the night; the hours of insomniacs and of people on the other side of the world. They’re mine and theirs and I want to embrace them, the hours, and I would but for what lurks beyond my threshold.

Because I am still a little girl, racing the monsters. I am still the child so afraid of the dark I will let blood dry on white carpet, so desperate am I to flee to the ghost-repellent safety of bedclothes.

Because I have these thoughts that surface sometimes, these images in my head from childhood nightmares or from terrifying lessons learned from a brush with the supernatural. I don’t mind them, when the sun’s out. In fact, sometimes I feel I need to process them—bring them out into the light where I can see and maybe strip away some of their mystery. But they’re like gremlins, these thoughts are; I can’t feed them after midnight. If I do, they’ll grow and mutate, and then in the early a.m. hours they come for me.

(12am) Skeletal, undead forms take shape in my mind; flesh ripped back to expose tendons and bone and they skitter about, decay allowing them to contort into positions so unnatural; up the stairs, in my doorway, on the ceiling.

(1am) A man, all black: black shirt, black pants, black boots, black mask—a substantial shadow. He holds a knife with a serrated blade in one hand, a roll of duct tape around his wrist. A book of matches is in his pocket, and a bottle of super-glue, the kind that dries almost instantly. He fingers the bottle, unseen while he watches me through the window. I want curtains.

(2am) My imagination plays cruel tricks on me. If I believe they’re there, they might as well be; I don’t know if I’m awake or dreaming. So I laugh ha ha ha because what else is left to do, when you are powerless to stop your worst fear approaching? Approaching quickly. Cold, paranormal. Of all, these 2am demons frighten me the most so I won’t speak of them. I can’t think about them, not anymore or The Terror will wedge itself deep in my brain and it won’t come out and dear God help me not be afraid of the dark the doors are locked the doors are locked...

It isn’t fair, how the fall of man perverts the night. Makes this beautiful, mysterious darkness into a cover for sin and evil; a breeding ground for legitimate reasons to be afraid. There is something so thaumaturgic and beautiful about the night; the way the air feels and the darkness, and if it wasn’t for the danger it brings it would be heaven to me.

And even so, sometimes it is. Because these dog-days of the summer are long; all-too lazy, hazy and blurred. The weeks have all blended in my mind, becoming one long smear of sluggish sunshine and sleepy eyes. Of tired, a little groggy play and hard decisions and loss, and tired again. It feels yellow to me, the smear. Dull yellow and some gray.

It is punctuated, though, with a thin black ribbon that is the summer nights. The ones when I have a little energy left over from the day, enough to be outside and absorb and think. They’re different this year somehow, maybe because my perspective has wandered so far from what it’s ever been before. Some good, maybe all bad? I can’t even tell—that’s how far off it is.

Either way, I spend too much time in my head so one night I grab Edgar (my iPod) and an old blanket to sit out by the pond for awhile. My senses seem sharper as I walk under this cool dusky veil. I vaguely dislike the way the grass prickles my socks, but more distinctly I feel the consistency of the air: moist, and so thick I almost believe I could see it if the sun was out.

I find a place on the bank and spread my blanket, just close enough to the water’s edge that my feet won’t get wet if I stretch them out.
The moon is full. Small and far-off, but bright and white like a florescent bulb. It leaves its print on the backs of my eyelids. The clouds around it still hold sunset hues, red and orange like war billows blazing in scarlet battalions, parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme. They stand out against the blue-black sky, making me think of painting with warm and cool colors; reminding me that anything any person ever knew about art, they learned first from these, God’s original pieces—the sky and all its jewels and gowns, all of nature, rustic things; things formed without the touch of man.

The warm colors fade quickly though, and the clouds blow past, leaving the moon and stars to their vivid lonesome. I watch their reflections on the water. The light trips constantly on the ripples and it looks like a slice of the sky has just fallen at my feet.
Trickles, drip-drop and water noises are made by creatures just below the surface of the pond, coming up to devour unsuspecting insects. The smooth head of a large catfish rises from the water, glistening in the moonlight for a moment before submerging once more. Fog crawls across, curls up from the water in elegant flourishes and the air it lends is so mysterious that I shudder slightly. It is surreal.

The fireflies are dream-like, too; so many…I have never seen so many fireflies. They are everywhere and all around me, sparkling in the darkness against the tree line like diamonds on black lace. It seems to me as if they all should have names, these little pixies; these living points of light, hovering above the tall grass’s misty tips that sway gently in the barely-breeze.

The water glittering below, the fireflies all around, the stars above; they blend together to surround me to form some terrestrial galaxy and the fog is swirling and oh, I feel like I’m in some awesome esoteric fairytale. Some strange fantasy land and I can’t believe it; I feel like I am seated in the eye of a miracle and it is so, so hard to believe that this is no phenomenon. This is every summer night; routine marvel. The most utterly orphic thing I have ever seen, and yet it is so common.

Words won’t come to me yet. I am in shock from the wonder. Everything is darkness and sparkling lights and silvery mist, and this feeling that I am in the very sky itself is so vivid I am dizzy for a moment, seizing fistfuls of grass to steady myself.

But as soon as I am reoriented, there are praises sparking on my every nerve ending, leaping from every wrinkle in my brain and all I can think is “Oh my God...oh my God...”. This magnificence, this beauty is so intense I think I might cry—my heart swells with it and is bursting because it is just too much. Too much numinous splendor. I can’t comprehend it; my eyes and mind are too small for something this ethereal, this mystically radiant.
And even so, God wastes it on me. It is just Him and I here; this is all—all—for me alone. No one else in the world is seeing exactly what I am seeing now. There may be many people admiring many different wonders, but this one, this exact picture I am in, was painted just for me. Little me, who can’t understand it at all.

And of course, my constantly-over-analyzing mind translates this into a metaphor. For His glory, grace and love. So arcane, so intimate, and yet so huge and illustrious; far too deep and far too wide for my comprehension and yet it is expressly for me.

And I want to cry again, this time with a longing to really know it. With a longing to understand and to truly experience Him.

Then this thought floats into my head, as if He whispered to me: “But you already are. In these sights and sounds, and in the air...you are in Me now, you are breathing Me. I am in your nostrils and in your lungs and in your soul; I am in the stars and the fireflies and in your dog at the foot of your bed. Every time you experience the good and beautiful things in My creations, you experience Me.”

I was a girl once, before I realized I’d been a machine all along. Before I knew how I worked, how everything that makes me can be reduced to chemicals in my brain and manipulated by instinct. Nature/nurture, compatible codes, triggers, colors and words.
But sometimes, for a moment, it’s different. On nights like this when I glimpse the dimension of the sky, or when I use a swing set, or feel the wind outside an airport in a strange place I remember what I am supposed to be: just this creation; this something-child swelling with wonder explicable only by the life-breath of God that’s in everything and it’s enough—more than enough—to live. To fly with forever.

And I am so thankful that, for all I’ve lost, I still have this.