Lullabies in the Dark
Scattered thoughts and tired eyes
Hello friends,
Is it the weekend again already? Time has been amorphous for me lately. Night and day, usually such stark delineations, are mere states of being. The sun rises and sets, but I am asleep through all of it. My eyes are open, but I don’t see much beyond the craving for the dark insides of my eyelids.
I want to equate my unsettled mind to a swarm of bees, but that would be insulting to the bees. The hum of a hive is full of knowledge and creativity. My head is more like TV static, mindless and disconnected from possibility. All my plans sink down into that endless ocean of grey, and the white noise lulls me to sleep. The signals get lost. I lose track of what I’m trying to tell myself.
I prefer it at night. Reality seems farther away when I’m in the dark. The stars have no expectations of me. The nightjars hold no judgment. I float in the black, basking in the absence of the day’s demands. The sun asks questions I don’t have the answers to. The moon only listens and lulls me to sleep.
Until next time,
Yardena
WEEKEND POTPOURRI:
Currently on repeat:
Listen to Robert Frost read his poem “Birches,” accompanied by woodland footage and related imagery from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
A poem:
I HAVE SLEPT IN MANY PLACES
By Denise Duhamel
After Diane Seuss First in the womb, my own space capsule in my mother’s universe, my eyelids sticky with pre-birth, then the incubator and crib, which I didn’t recognize as a prison until years later when my sister stood inside it and I, rising from my first big-girl bed, unlatched her because she was hungry for breakfast. Then my grammy’s four-poster, kiddie sleeping bag, the hospital bed, where I was hoarse after I relinquished my tonsils. A mat during kindergarten naptime, the backseat of my mother’s car, another hospital bed with silver bars on the side where I wrote my first stories. The double bed I shared with my sister when our twins gave out. A college dorm mattress with another girl’s period stain, a damp study-abroad bed in Wales, Eurail seats where I could sleep overnight and save money on a hostel if I picked the right schedule. Hostel bunk beds with bathrooms down the hall. A friend’s waterbed, another friend’s bed on her father’s boat. Then my cousin’s hand-me-down mattress in my first apartment in Boston, a boyfriend’s bed in Revere, a bed of another boy hoping to make my Revere boyfriend jealous. Sublet beds, a bed in a furnished studio apartment in Tucson where there was no way of knowing who’d slept on it before me. Futon in the East Village right on the floor. Same futon on a used loft bed to suspend me above the mice. Then a lavender pullout Mary Richards couch. Vacation beds, hotel beds. More boyfriend beds in Brooklyn and Alphabet City. Hotel beds. Florida marital bed and another hospital bed— this time surgery. Divorce bed (same as marital bed with mattress flipped for good luck). Evacuation beds during hurricanes. My true-love’s bed with its magic mattress topper. I know I am forgetting so many places— subways, lounge chairs in the sand, Amtrak seats, movie theaters, hammocks, my niece’s college graduation (I had taken a Vicodin), conference beds, beds at colleges or hotels after I’d given poetry readings, emergency row plane seats, on my mother’s breast when I was an infant, in my father’s arms after a childhood asthma attack. My parents’ bed after their deaths. I’m heading for the hard coffin bed myself, my eyes sewn shut against insomnia. I’ve asked the undertaker to press glow-in-the-dark stars inside the lid.