Allison Whittenberg

Short Fiction

The mind 

As fragile as 

Is 

The dream 

It dreams 

I wrote this poem in 2018, at the tail end of the long journey back. My evolution toward my feeling of sleep changed over the years. I used to think not sleeping was cool. Sleeping was so square –who wouldn’t make the most of every hour of life and stay up all night, every night? That’s the way to live and wring all that you can out of life. I read a book about it calling out that many highly productive people barely sleep. Women as varied as Margaret Thatcher and Maya Angelou. Famous men like Abraham Lincoln and Vincent Van Gogh. Just think how much work you could accomplish if you use twenty-one hours each day rather than a mere sixteen. Your content and your production level would be off the charts compared to your sleepyhead cohorts. I was sold on this way of thinking and until my late twenties, I sought out situations where I could fight off rest. 

I used to bartend which took me deep into the night, and always hung out after closing for 

one for the road.

I had waitressed in an all-night diner. 

I taught night school.

I pulled a night watch during my stint in the military. 

I was a Nightfly, DJing at a radio station spinning the red-eye shift, all the while trying to make it to prime time drive time. I never made it. Languishing in the thickness of night, that black ink, playing music and talking largely to myself and just a few other night owls. 

Seeking uninterruption, I used to write at night. All night. The inky nature of darkness had a boundless quality to it. It was during that time I wrote many of my sunniest works like this poem: 

Your June 

Picture the year as a clock: it’s straight up 6 and the world spreads before you like ketchup. 

Don’t shade your eyes, you’ll miss a minute. 

You are a thirsty bee; pollen is everywhere. 

So many flowers, so many flowering chances… 

No vagueness, just brilliance! 

Each color, every contour — 

Awake! 

Anew! 

Alive! 

I wrote that at four in the morning just in time to meet with my poetry group the next day. I had written some three hundred poems during my life, the bulk during this time – not all of them are sound but all of them expressed in bursts something that I was feeling. Going over my

poetry is like flipping through pictures in a scrapbook. Each poem was worth a thousand words, especially since I rarely wrote stanzas over a hundred words. 

Then came all this mishegoss. In the midst of it, I lost the ability to simply fall asleep. As I have detailed I was dismantling and for most of this disassembling, I didn’t know why. Now I did. Even after I got the right diagnosis, it still didn’t put me at ease. As said, with its twenty percent fatality rate, knowing I had scleroderma was hardly a comfort. 

So I stayed awake. And thought. I thought of all the doctor’s visits I had made to “the top” docs all the while getting sicker and being pinballed from office to office the waiting rooms where everyone sorta, kinda have what you have and are in different stages of my ailment. These people had turned to wax with oxygen tubes blasting into their nostrils. 

I’m going to die/ I’m going to die. I’m going to die in my sleep if I fall asleep. 

That’s what I feared if I went to sleep I would just not wake up. I would fade off and then what would happen? 

This had happened before in my family, I had an uncle who had a heroin addiction problem. It wasn’t his fault he’d caught it thanks to his uncle Sam while stationed overseas. He came back high as a proverbial kite.  He died in his apartment. He lived alone and wasn’t found for some two weeks after his passing. The indentation of Uncle Fred’s body was still present on the mattress even after he had been removed. Though this happened before I was born, I knew this fact well. My father told me this story from time to time. My father found himself dramatically outliving all five siblings. The second oldest, he had lost them all to tuberculosis, drugs, or the war. Dying in your sleep…

 My father had a sister who died of TB at 19.  He spoke of her from time to time.  Never by name.  He always called her, Baby Sis.

Dying in my sleep…

You would think I would have made some preparation if I believed this but I never did. Sort of like people leave a suicide note,  you would think I would have left a in case I-don’t-wake-up note. Since I was so certain of my imminent doom, I should have drafted a note and left it as I said it’s just myself and my young son. I should have made clear to anyone who would have found me a list of instructions. 

At night, I found my muscles cramped up. It took a while for me to iron out my fingers again so that they would move. Ironically, I would also get sleepy feet a lot. Usually this “condition” is harmless but as it recurred several times a day with me, it’s beyond a nuisance. To regain feeling, I would use circular motions to massage but then the repetitive motion would cause my fingers to convulse again. 

Since my late teens, I’d slept in the nude. I was going out with an older guy who not only suggested it but offered to come by and monitor it.  He was long gone off to the resting place of past infatuates.  By habit, I kept this up during this time. As much as I was concerned about dying in the middle of the night I never leaped. I didn’t think about how I would be found. Now, I’m not a prude – but all things being equal I would like to retain my dignity and present my dead body clothed. 

I kept a robe nearby and when I was tired of tossing and turning and finally stopped the charade (the fake out) and got out of bed. I would hate most of all to sleep for an hour or two but then wake up hoping I’d see daylight. Instead, not, just the same obscurity. The same gloom. It was still bedtime for most people, but I couldn’t get myself to stay asleep. 

I was convinced if I fell asleep I wouldn’t be able to fight off death, but awake I could. Most of the time I got up and did something, but this was limited because I had to be quiet, at this time I had Tiego in the next room. It’s not that I could vacuum at a time like this. I’d often go downstairs and sit at the kitchen table and try to write but by this time in my illness, it all came out like panicked gibberish. I couldn’t straighten things up for fear of creaking the wooden floor. I was too exhausted to think straight and I thought I was going to die. Also, I feel like I’ve been tackled by an NFL player or worked over by an MMA fighter, (MMA – Is it a sport what exactly are you being judged at prowess or ruthlessness?) 

I sat there catastrophizing and catastrophizing. 

My joints hurt, I’m going to die. 

And oh, no. I’m up again. Why can’t I sleep? 

Why do I even bother trying to go to sleep? I know I can’t. 

Negative automatic thoughts crowded me without a rational response. The emotional 

intensity rose as energy drained from me.  So what I thought was so cool before I learned 

Was anything but when the sun rose. The very opposite of productivity; I was tired during this 

time. I couldn’t get started. There was no on button with me. All I could do was move through the 

the gauze of daylight, in a daze. I could not work, at this time,  No energy, just malaise. I 

couldn’t write a poem, I couldn’t write a sentence. In all honesty, at the height of my insomnia, I 

had lost the ability to read a sentence. 

Simple things I lost the richness of. I had no potency. I just existed (which was, of course, a goal because Ididn’twanttodie!)  

This sleep deprivation was able to win over my pigmentation loss and soon deep, dark circles etched themselves under my eyes. 

Who says there is no upside to everything?

The mind is as fragile as the dream it dreams, indeed.

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Allison Whittenberg‘s novels are Sweet Thang, Hollywood and Maine, Life is Fine, and Tutored (Random House 2006, 2008, 2009, and 2010). Her poetry has appeared in Columbia Review, Feminist Studies, J Journal, and New Orleans Review.