Living Surreality One Night in Oregon
It’s getting late and I can’t wait to sleep.
Insomnia always has hold of me at bedtime.
Tonight I feel hopeful of a visit from the sandman!
My adult son and his buddies are drinking and playing cards.
I’ve eaten three or four little squares like chocolate -
wondering when my desire to sleep will kick in.
After two and a half hours pass, I stand up, and OH MY.
I am sinking into the floor! Can that really be?
A big smile comes to my face. I feel incredible.
Those at the table tell me teasingly, “Finally!”
I excuse myself from the table, heading upstairs,
holding onto the bannister of a long staircase,
anxious to get some Z’s.
As I lie down in the guest bedroom, my heart begins racing.
It beats faster, faster, faster.
My ears have become super-human.
I can hear my son and his friends
downstairs laughing about me.
Not only that, I hear every word they are saying,
.
I cry out to my son, “I think something is wrong.
My heart is pounding so fast!”
They fly up to my room and take my pulse
“Wow, it’s super fast,” they say, “but you are
still not in a danger zone. Try to sleep.”
They leave the room and I stay there,
staring at the walls and the ceiling.
Will I be ok? Will I be ok?
Thoughts, along with my heart, are racing.
Time crawls on and on;
I realize with great disappointment
that I will not be getting any sleep tonight.
I go into the bathroom.
Everything feels so weird!
My body is not natural.
I go to the top of the stairs to let the guys know
I still can hear them talking about me
way down there in the kitchen.
As I call down to them, I get to the middle
of my sentence, and the words drop away.
Can’t even remember what I was going to say!
I need to write all this down, I tell myself.
I grab my little notebook from my purse
and lie back down in the bedroom.
My writing is like that of a small child!
As I try to write my feelings,
I can barely hold the pen steady.
After struggling to write a page and a half of impressions,
I can tell it's obvious that as I write each phrase,
It then just trails away.
My fingers, as well as my voice,
cannot keep up with my thoughts.
Well, that experiment was a big fail!
Suddenly, around 3 a.m. my son and two of his buddies
pop their heads into my room.
They remind me of three giant sized cartoon characters.
Did that just happen? What the heck!
I follow them into another guest bedroom
to tell my son goodnight, but did I really do that?
Somehow even now, I don’t know if I did it.
I lie back down; it’s no good to even close my eyes.
When will I feel normal again?
I wait for the morning’s light.
Copyright ©
Andrea Dietrich
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