The small hours

It's 3:25 AM on Tuesday morning, and I'm quite wide awake. I'm almost always awake at 3. I usually read when I wake up in the middle of the night, or I scroll mindlessly, and then feel bad about myself.  Yesterday, however, it occurred to me that I could try to write my way through the nightly periods of unwanted wakefulness. And so here I am. Welcome to the insomnia chronicles, volume 1. 

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That was last night, or early this morning. It's 5:30 PM now, closer to my usual writing time. I worked at home today as I always do on Tuesdays. I was not productive. Distracted, scatterbrained, and muddy in my head, I floundered through the day, flopping like a fish from one task to the next, from one idea to another. I need a deadline. Deadlines make me panic, and nothing puts things in focus like a good solid panic attack. 

Did you come here for time management advice? Probably not a good idea. 

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It's Wednesday now, 2:33 AM. I don't have anything to say at 2 in the morning, so I think I'll read rather than write. Good night. Or good morning.

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The small hours can be bleak, you know what I mean?  I've had some of my best panic attacks at 3 AM. But of course I have mental health breakdowns during the day, too. Really, there's no bad time for an existential crisis.

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And don't come around here looking for mental health advice, either. Word to the wise. 

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But the pre-dawn hours aren't always bad. Sometimes I just get up out of the bed and get a head start on the day and then get back under the covers an hour before I have to get up.  Even if I can't sleep, I lie there feeling peaceful, knowing that my to-do list is a few items shorter. When I do sleep in that last pre-alarm hour, it's really concentrated sleep. Distilled sleep. Essence of sleep. If I don't feel like doing chores at 3 in the morning, I read. Either way, the small hours of the morning can be a very pleasant time.

Or not. 

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I wonder sometimes if animals are fearful in advance. Like are they anxious about possibly running into a predator, and do they consciously plan their activities with hiding places and escape routes in mind? Or do they only feel fear when there's something to actually be afraid of. The latter, I hope. 

Anyway, I wonder about this because a coyote - a COYOTE! - was spotted in our neighborhood and now I gotta figure out how to survive an encounter with a coyote because I always feel fear well in advance of an event occurring, whether or not it’s an event that is likely to occur. That I now have to plan a coyote-fighting strategy doesn’t seem reasonable, since I’m in Maryland and not Arizona. Why on EARTH should I have to evade coyotes. I arranged my entire life so as not to ever have to be within 50 miles of a coyote. But of course, I also arranged my life so as to ensure the widest possible berth between me and the nearest bear and look how that turned out. 

Well, yes, of course this has something to do with insomnia. It’s stuff like this that keeps me up at night. 

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I did some research, and it turns out that Maryland has been home to a small but resilient little coyote population for over 50 years. The call has been coming from inside the house this whole time. Not sure if that makes me feel better or not - that I’ve managed to avoid coyote encounters for the entire 24 years that I have lived in Maryland is a good thing, of course, but I’d prefer to have held on to my blissful ignorance about their presence, because now I’m sure that it’s just blind luck that I haven’t been attacked by a coyote yet, and good luck is always due to run out at some point. According to the Maryland natural resources site where I learned that coyotes and I have been coexisting for 24 years, coyotes are the most-disliked wild animal species in Maryland, held in “almost universal disdain” (disdain is the state of Maryland’s word not mine) by human Marylanders. Nobody likes an animal that preys on cats and dogs, let alone small children. Not to mention the coyote’s well-known habit of blowing up their victims with Acme Corporation-manufactured explosives or dropping heavy objects on them from great heights. I’m not a road runner. When that anvil drops from an overpass, I won’t see it coming until it’s too late. 

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So it’s Memorial Day Weekend now, or MDW as we summer people like to call it. Saturday morning, bright and sunny but at least 15 degrees colder than I would prefer the first day of summer to be. This happens now - we have unseasonably cold weather in late May which gives way very suddenly to real hazy summer warmth some time around the middle of June. It happens so regularly now, in fact, that the cold late May temperatures aren’t really unseasonable anymore. 

MDW usually brings with it some relief from the sleepless stressed-out mental health misery of spring. But this year’s crisis feels like it’s going to stick around for a bit. It has some staying power. Intractable, that is the word I would use. Intractable. It’s too cold to swim and despite the pale blue cloudless sky and the clear warm sunshine, I find myself uninterested in leaving the house today. 

But leave the house I must and shall. I have things to do that cannot be accomplished remotely, and I want to feel the way it looks outside. So I’m doing outside things this weekend, cold water and coyotes be damned. 

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I really didn’t think that I was going to swim this weekend. It was chilly enough just sitting poolside with my friends that I needed a sweater. But the crazy children were all in the pool, and then a few adults ventured in a toe at a time. When my neighbor and fellow lap swimmer started on  his usual mile swim (I don’t swim a mile), I thought about how silly it would be to have spent two hours at the pool and not to have actually gone swimming. Then another almost-daily swimming neighbor showed up, pulled off her swim cover-up, stepped into a lap lane, and started swimming. Well, I thought, if another middle-aged lady can do it, then I can certainly do it. And I did, and it was freezing cold, and even after ten laps I was still freezing cold, and even two hours later after a hot shower and dry clothes, I was still cold. Actually, I was freezing cold all evening on Saturday - that might have been hypothermia. But everything that has been worrying me, fueling the nonstop panic and anxiety, was gone, just for a short time in that clear sun-sparkling cold blue water. It was glorious, and I’m going to do it again today. And I don’t think coyotes swim, at least not in the lap lane of a neighborhood pool.