One trick I use when I can’t sleep is to take my brain on
walks,...
One trick I use when I can’t sleep is to take my brain on
walks, to try to picture every detail of a familiar path to ease my head
towards z’s. Another is to try to remember every bed I’ve slept in. I don’t
recommend this technique because it often backfires; eventually you’ll come to
a bed you regret. That brings the bad sort of uncalm you want to avoid in the
latedark threes when the gears of perspective grind wrong. I don’t know why I
keep trying this trick.
This is a bed up in the ghosty attic of my grandmother’s
house, which no longer belongs to her, in part because she’s dead and in part
because it’s been sold away. It was a scary room to sleep, for the ghosts, for
the deep, unlit corners. The boards along the low wall there, they live in my
bedroom now, extracted by a generous contractor in charge of dismantling the
place after it was sold. They’re big boards but they’ve disappeared into the
landscape of my bedroom; I forget they’re there. But I found myself looking at
them last night. I looked at their splintery heft, holding the essence of my
favorite room of all, and I remembered that bed there, where I slept and got
brushed by ghosts in the night. Maybe some of them exist in the wood and will
emerge like genies rubbed out of bottles when I sand the boards to make a
table.
