It starts in February.
Not the insomnia exactly.
The negotiation with sleep.
The way the mind, which has been cooperative,
starts its own separate accounting
in the hours after midnight,
running numbers you cannot resolve,
replaying conversations that went fine,
rehearsing conversations that have not happened yet.
I learned the feeling.
The particular quality of 3 a.m.
in the weeks before the email.
I learned what to do with it.
Nothing, mostly.
You cannot fix 3 a.m. with logic.
You can only wait it out,
let the mind run its accounting,
try not to add to the ledger
by deciding what the silence means.
The silence never meant what I feared.
Or it sometimes did
and I survived that too.
But the body did not know
the difference between the silence
that was administrative delay
and the silence that was the answer.
The body treated all silence as emergency.
Twenty-five years of that.
Twenty-five Februaries.
Twenty-five stretches of negotiated sleep
that left me less rested
than the work required.
I did the work anyway.
I always did the work.
What I am learning now
is how to sleep in winter.
How to let the silence be silence.
How to stay in the body at 3 a.m.
and tell it:
this is not an emergency.
This is just February.
The tulips are still under the ground.
They are fine.
You are fine.
Go back to sleep.
Estoy aprendiendo a dormir sin esperar. Es la cosa más difícil que he intentado.
I am learning to sleep without waiting. It is the hardest thing I have tried.
