The sleeplessness of it all...

Well then suddenly, there was no one left standing in the hall...
In a flood of tears that no one really ever heard fall at all,
oh I went searchin' for an answer...
Up the stairs and down the hall, not to find an answer...
just to hear the call of a nightbird...
singing come away...
come away...

"Stevie Nicks, "Edge of Seventeen"

I can't sleep. Everyone told me that I would be sleep deprived after she died. It wasn't that I didn't believe them, all my well-wishers, it just wasn't so. I was sleeping fine. You tend to do that after about the third glass of merlot. But, the merlot isn't really good for me and I sort of knew that from the beginning. Besides, I'm a rules girl and the rules say that's not the way I'm supposed to handle this, so I don't do that anymore. And, now I can't sleep. I wake up in the middle of the deep, dark night with the strangest songs in my head, or snippets of an old memory clanking around in my rusty, metal-ly mind. I toss. I turn (several times). I sigh. I cry. I get up and make some coffee. I think complicated, impressive thoughts. I wonder if she thinks of me, too. I wonder where she is, what she does all day long up there. I wonder, can she see me from up there? Do I look like an ant in downtown Manhattan from a far away plane? Is there really a Heaven? Is she somewhere, anywhere?

Once upon a time when I was a different girl - before life took hold of me and shook me senseless, someone I loved very much told me that it might not be what I thought it was, this life. It's always about the "me"ness of things. It's my stuff: my blanket, my doll, my Disney DVDs, my Ipod, my phone, my car...these things MUST make me more me, right? I can't be as special as you unless I have more "my" things. In Eckhart Tolle's "A New Earth" (which I did not enjoy! I'm sorry, Oprah, but this is one hot tamale train I did not buy a ticket for. Though, I am quoting it, huh?) we learn that in order to have peace you have to let go of the ego - let go of your "me" in order to fully understand how tiny little you fits in the big, bad old world. It's just an outward expression of what we Southern children heard preached to us every Sunday growing up in the Bible Belt - material things don't make you better...and you can't take it with you, anyway. But, what about the deeper layer? What about one more cut into the flesh of consciousness? Back to me as a younger me...someone said, basically - what if it isn't all about us? What if it's not about the human race even? What if, and I quote, we - our entire civilization as we know it- are "but a speck of dust under a giant's big toenail." We think that, even if we aren't all that and the bag of proverbial chips, we're at least a chink in the chain of life that is all encompassing. Maybe that isn't true...maybe eternity is just an insignificant speck in the face of something that doesn't even recognize us. Maybe we are to this bigger thing what a single-celled, undiscovered, unimportant, unknown algae thingamabobber out in the middle of the ocean is to us....absolutely NOTHING. Sort of a modern day "Horton Hears a Who", huh? Who needs a Big Bang Theory when we have Dr. Seuss?

I wonder about these things. I wonder if it all really matters. Maybe the unknown algae mechanisms have their versions of hospitals and cancers and little girls who die too soon. Maybe they have single-cell amoeba-like mothers who can't sleep at night and wonder about the complexities of grief and whether they will ever smile again that sort of smile that actually reaches their eyes...not the one they've perfected that just twists the mouth into something that could pass for a smile so people will stop staring at them in public places. Maybe they long not to feel their single cell pulled through their chest cavities and stomped on, over and over again. Maybe they wonder if they will always be this way - maybe it hurts so bad for them, too. I wonder about all these things. And, still, the songs play and the memories loop in an endless reel in my head. And, I know, I need to sleep..........and, I hope she sleeps, too. For she is my universe and I am but a speck of her dust.