After I was settled into my new place, I spent my nights alone, sipping beer while reading fiction or streaming films and, occasionally, looking for a job. I loved listening to the ocean in the background, working relentlessly, creating wave after wave, as if it were nature’s fail-safe metronome.
Often, I would wake up on the floor in the morning, with a book or my laptop open beside me, wondering why I hadn’t walked the twenty feet to my bed the night before. I’d already known I wasn’t a good sleeper, but I soon discovered that trying to sleep in a bed made it even more difficult for me—something about the planning part of falling asleep ruined it. A bed was, apart from its sexual implications, a symbol for sleep, and once I was aware that I was contributing to some tradition, I would just lie there for hours, hoping sleep would come, though it hardly did. I could feel my body hunkering down into the sheets, worn out, begging sleep to take it, but my mind was far too conniving to comply. And sleep—similar to my experiences with the last scheduled train passing through a Western European town—never seemed to wait long for those hurrying to catch it; once I let it pass me by, I knew I had a whole night of restlessness ahead of me.
So the best sleeps I ever had were ones resulting from my own trickery; I set up on the floor to read a book or watch a film, and sometimes my mind would make a mistake and let me fall asleep because I wasn’t in a bed. But then my mind would get smarter and recognize my intentions, and I would have to try the chair on the patio or the top of my kitchen table or next to a bush outside. I soon realized the difficulty in outsmarting the suspicious mind, especially when it was my own. Sleep was a battle I was constantly losing.
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