What’s the opposite of casting a shadow? Whatever it is called, it’s what the street lights are doing to your ceiling right now. The weeping figs and the monstera and the giant peace lily create ghostly silhouettes against the naked windows. There’s a big rectangle of light above the window, almost precisely along the width of it, but it is somewhat askew. How annoying for an orderly person like you. Fainter rectangles are shooting out from it, somehow giving a biblical feeling or reminding you of that Japanese war flag, the rising sun. Ha, you’re so tired, you can hardly make sense of your own thoughts anymore.

Time seem to move both faster and slower when you can’t sleep. Fast, because you have meetings in the morning, meetings that are important and you need to be at your best and sharpest. Fast, because you are tired, and you need sleep, today was rough and tomorrow will be rougher. Fast, because the minutes are firmly, inevitably ticking away, making you need to cope with less and less time to sleep. Countless times during the night you’ve thought “If I just go to sleep now, it’s okay.” And you try. You yawn, and stretch and yawn again and you try to curl up or stretch out or whatever it is that you always do, but as you lay there, weary…

You can’t sleep.

During your multiple (unsuccessful) efforts to sleep you start to pay attention to sounds. You hear the faucet drip twice. You hear a car go by outside. You hear the neighbor upstairs move around. You are a little glad that you’re not the only one awake. After a while of relative silence (ah, the neighbor went to sleep), you start to hear the sound of the refrigerator and the faint noise from the outside that never seems to cease. Vaguely, you wonder what the source could be, but you’re too tired to think up an answer. Had you’d been younger, you’d thought of some Stephen King-like explanation. And then you’d been awake because of that.

Drip

And, while your thoughts are rambling, something strange happens to your understanding of “time”. This minute start to look just the same as the one before, the night doesn’t seem to proceed at all and the darkness in your room hasn’t changed a bit. It’s tempting to think that time hasn’t in fact passed, that it is still just a little after midnight and that you should really get to sleep but it will be okay anyway. How cruel that 3 a:m looks so very similar to 1 a:m or even 11 p:m when you have insomnia… How luxurious it wouldn’t it be to have 7, no, even 5 hours of sleep would be good!

Then eventually you give up and you accept your sleepless fate. You lie in your bed, listening to the dripping faucet, the sound of whatever it is outside and your own random thoughts. “That monstera still looks frightening. Why do you have such scary plants? Must get flowers that look prettier in the night-time…”

And, you sleep.