My Brief Experience as a Ten Year Old Insomniac

A chronicle of my attempts to fall asleep as a caffeinated ten-year-old.

It’s because I drank all that coca-cola. My mother told me not to drink it, because I wouldn’t be able to sleep, and I went ahead and drank it anyways just to prove her wrong.

Weird things happen when you can’t fall asleep. It’s the strangest phenomenon, when you’re trapped between the frustrating alertness of your stubborn subconscious and a dark stretch of uninterrupted time.

But I can listen to music. Relaxing songs. That’ll help. First I put on Daysleeper, by REM. It seems to be working, until I realize I like the song so much I’m bouncing a bit in my bed as I listen. That isn’t helping, so I put on Lullaby, by Billy Joel. Damnit, now I’m crying. This isn’t working at all. I become angry and listen to Enter Sandman by Metallica. By this point, all hope is lost. The next song that comes on is Revolution Nine by the Beatles. I listen to the whole thing, just to spite myself.  

After the song is over, I get out of bed and pace around my room. So music didn’t work. That’s fine. It’s only one in the morning. If I fall asleep right now, I might still get five hours of sleep. Five hours of sleep is respectable. I leave my ipod on my desk and crawl back into bed.

I try to take long, relaxing breaths, but as I do, my breathing gets faster and faster. I can hear my heart pounding in my chest. Why is it beating so fast? It shouldn’t be beating so goddamn fast. I squeeze my eyes shut and clench my fists. The back of my thigh itches. I rub my leg back and forth against the sheets. It doesn’t help. I roll over onto my stomach and my hair gets trapped underneath my arm. It’s too hot in this room. My leg still itches. My neck is sore. My jaw hurts. My hair is sticking to the back of my neck. I open and close my jaw. I wrench my neck to the side, hoping it will crack. It doesn’t. My leg still itches. I can hear my heart beating faster and faster. It is too hot in this room. It is way too hot.

I sit upright suddenly, with one hand pushing the hair out of my face and the other hand scratching frantically at the back of my thigh. I wish my nails were longer. I get out of bed and walk across the room and wrench the window open. The cold summer breeze hits me in the face. I let out a sigh of relief and inhale the warm smell of freshly cut grass. I hesitate at the edge of the window, staring longingly at the treetops bathed in cool, silver moonlight.

I should go for a walk on the path.

Before I can question the rationality of this decision, I have pulled on my boots and my jacket and I am tiptoeing down the staircase towards the front door. When I feel the cold air on my face, a tingle of excitement runs down my spine, followed by a twinge of guilt. This probably isn’t going to help me fall asleep.

But now I’m committed. I walk down my driveway towards the wooded area on the opposite side of the road. The nearly-full moon illuminates my path as I walk. My heart is beating steadily now. I inhale once, slowly, and then exhale once again. I can’t bear the thought of returning to the suffocating claustrophobia of my room. I continue up the path, heading deeper and deeper into the woods, comforted by the calm solitude provided by the forest.  I keep my head turned towards the ground as I walk, to avoid tripping over any roots.  I don’t need to look up to know where I’m going. I’ve walked this path in the dark hundreds of times before, but never this late at night.

Suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, I see a flash of light.

Not moonlight�"fake light. Artificial light. I snap my head up and stop in my tracks.  Not ten feet away, I see the outline of a thin man and a large dog standing facing me across the path. I stare at them with my mouth open. This is the first time I’ve encountered anyone else on the path.

And then the man speaks. “Are you lost?” he asks. He shines his flashlight directly on me and I am blinded. I shield my face with my hand.

“Are you lost?” I echo breathlessly, unsure whether or not he can hear me.

“Where do you live?” he asks. He lowers the flashlight and takes a step closer.

“Here,” I say, then I turn around and I sprint back down the path. I can hear the man shouting something after me, but I keep running anyways. I stumble over roots and rocks as I go but I keep running anyways, my heart pumping fanatically, my breath coming in and out in short, hurried gasps. This is not going to help me sleep at all.

As I arrive at my front door, the panic begins to fade and gradually is replaced by angry tears of embarrassment. I replay the conversation in my head and heat rises to my cheeks. There I was, with my overlarge snow boots and pink ski jacket and Pokémon pajamas, standing there frozen with my mouth open like a fish. That man probably thought I was such a freak. But why should he? It wasn’t fair. What was he doing on my path?

I close the front door behind me and run upstairs to my room, hardly bothering to keep quiet anymore. I pull off my boots and climb into my bed and pull the covers over my head and lie there shaking. My heart is beating even faster than before. The open window has made my room ice cold, but I can’t bring myself to move from the underneath the covers. I lie there, shivering, wide awake, running the scene over and over in my head and growing angrier and angrier each time I do. It isn’t until I hear the sound of birds chirping outside my window that my eyelids finally grow heavy and I drift off to sleep.

 

“Eva! Do you know anything about this?”

I run downstairs and slide across the wood floor in my new socks. “Can I have some coca-cola?”

My mother puts the newspaper down on the table and frowns at me. “Didn’t it keep you up last time?” she asks.

“No,” I say.

My mother shakes her head like she doesn’t believe me. “In the police report, it says a man walking his dog spotted a young girl running down that path between Pinnacle and Rowe at one thirty-five in the morning.” She pauses. “You think it could’ve been Masha or Emily?”

“They don’t go up there,” I say. “Why was he walking his dog at one thirty-five in the morning?”

My mother looks up from the newspaper and stares at me with narrowed eyes. “Good question,” she says.