Nocturnal Nightmares

Stretching. Gliding. Falling. Finally free, or abandoned? It was during a mid-October evening when I saw it. The beauty, the sorrow. Cast against the red glow of a deflated sunset, I watched them fall, the dozens by the dozens. Stirred up by a fall breeze, they branched into the air. I couldn’t help but smile. There’s something fantastic about a big old oak shedding its leaves, although if you asked me what, I couldn’t say.

I’m parched for sleep, drowned in consciousness. I just want to let go and dream but I can’t. Was it Einstein who called insanity a state of unjust repetition; repeating the same action over and over again, expecting a different result? If that’s true, I must be insane.

I can’t sleep.

I sit up and push my back straight against the wall, gawking at the window and the blue-blackness of the dark hours that it reveals. What can be found from darkness? I consider. I avert my eyes toward the floor, then the ceiling. The room is silent save for one fan humming in the corner. HMMMMMM it goes, swaying from side to side. It’s a stir-stick, mixing the pot. I sense the early hour, but check my phone anyway— Yep, 2:00 AM. The time blares at me, an insult to my latest bout of insomnia. This isn’t normal. Something must be misaligned. I can sense a transition coming but when? I don’t discover much in that dark room sitting on my bed with my back against the wall. Some bugs have bunked with me in the room. When I was a child I couldn’t stand the sight of creepy-crawlers. Guess I’ve gotten used to them somewhat. They nest in the light fixture on the ceiling. Their presence doesn’t bother me in the moment, but I know their eradication will arrive soon. I can’t, after all, let them fester. For now, though, I’ll allow them sleep. I decide it's time to move on. I set my feet to the floor and pull up my tattered jeans, looping my belt around my waist, strapping it in place. I’ve lost weight, I can tell. About an inch around my abdomen, I’d say. It’s all this walking, I try and convince myself. I drape a black t-shirt over my chest, and find a good coat, black also. I’m not looking for anything exceptional. I’m just done waiting for sleep. If I can’t find it, than it may find me.

The air isn’t as cold as I thought it would be. After ten minutes of walking I remove my coat and drape it over one arm. In the silence of the hour, I can’t help but feel irrelevant. I feel no call to home, no tension drawing me back to any particular place or person. I’m drifting through the motions, wandering in sightless thought and philosophical ramblings attempting to answer questions with nowhere to return them. Does this make me homeless? It certainly makes me helpless, I decide. I’m caught in a dialogue with myself, a paradoxical state of being which I can’t control as one. I find an empty cornfield and lie down.

The sky is as cloudless as I am sleepless. Perhaps there remains some clarity with insomnia. Perhaps I’m looking for clarity. But while the absence of clouds should afford me some stars to view, a full moon outshines all subtlety. It’s the center of the sky, drawing everyone’s attention to its sublime reflections. The moon is just a mirror, in at least one-way or another. It’s grey dust bounces sunlight to us. Such a simple mechanism… uninteresting even. But damn if it isn’t the most fantastic thing I can see. Not even the power of cynicism can outdo the good nature of the moon.

I dream to visit the moon one day. I want to bounce from crater to crater, walking along the boiler of the locomotive that travels our tides. “How would you get there?” That’s a question I’m often asked when I blather about my moon obsession. The answer is relatively simple. The moon is some 250,000 odd miles away. Apollo made the journey in about three days. Not a bad time-investment, if you ask me. I’m sure many would argue that going to the moon is just a plain old bad investment, that there’s no point in going to a place without a purpose— as if adventure wasn’t purpose enough. “What would you do there?” I’ve been asked this from time to time, although not nearly as often as I’d like. I consider it the more important question, if not for its answer, than for its meaning. What would I do on the moon? I don’t have an answer. I adventure, unencumbered by purpose. Most people need a purpose, and not just that which they find within themselves, but something else; something grand and meaningful, that transcends them. They can’t accept that just existing with a place is significant.

Our observable universe stretches some unbelievable distance outward. Lots consider this the edge, but that’s not true. It’s a false border. We can’t see beyond the edge of our observable universe because light from galaxies beyond conceivable distances has yet to reach us. The universe as we see it is a globe of equal distance on all sides, with Earth at the center. But we are not the center. That’s just how we perceive it. If planets like our own were out there with life like us, perhaps pondering these same questions, they would be at the center of their own observable universe. More startlingly, we couldn’t see one another, unless our universes overlapped. Earth and her compatriots may live an eternity without ever knowing of the other’s existence. I wonder if humans live by the same code of the observable universe. Our perspectives may be limited by what we know and can see. The center can’t see itself.

Suddenly I don’t feel so irrelevant. Looking up at the moon, I realize that the atoms making up my body, my brain, and my conscience were forged inside stars that exploded their enriched guts into space. Those guts allowed places like the Earth and its moon to fester into being. They allowed us to be born. The gravity that keeps us grounded is the same gravity that keeps the moon and Earth locked in the relative safety of their tango. And we are a part of that dance. I’ll always know there’s a place for me, if not on this planet, than somewhere in our observable universe, or perhaps another’s. We’re all made from the same stuff.

That is significant.

I had fallen asleep in the cornfield. It was still dark when I woke. The moon had jumped to a new quadrant of the sky. My skin had turned pale, paler than usual. The cold had finally settled in and my arms were numb. I slipped on my coat, and popped its collar to protect my neck. My ears stung and the tips of my fingers pounded with each beat of my heart. I wandered home, promising myself the next time I was stretching, gliding, falling (finally free or abandoned), I would bring a hat.