A Little Night Music

Nory was not sleeping at all.  The air was cool but damp, and it was difficult to acchieve the right combination of warm and tired.

She was thinking about an ex of hers who was living in Cape Cod one winter.  He came down to get her and brought her back to a knotty pine house barely furnished but for a grand piano and a couch in the living room.

He had a bed, of course, and they would listen to the radio at night, falling asleep.  The radio had no knobs so they had to put a dime between the prongs to turn the dials. 

When she got there, she found a jazz station that played wonderful soft nightime music from the thirties.  Together, falling asleep they heard big bands play slow numbers and Billie sing the sad blues.

When Nory went home for a while, Kenneth called her to say he could not find the station anywhere.

It is as if it only plays when you are here by me, he said.

What happened to clock radios? Nory thought just before drifting into slumber.

Bad Habit

Every night when I am too exhausted to read any more, and my wrists ache from holding the book up, I put it down, and turn off the light. Immediately I get too hot to be comfortable in bed, and outside of the bed, the heat has been turned down to nothing, which generally registers somewhere between 54 and 61 degrees Fahrenheit (just in case).

I try to drift off, but my mind starts dictating prose that it thinks I should write, and often, I get up, and those words are no longer available to me, so I write whatever comes to mind.

I should not get out of bed, but when you cannot sleep, it is hard to stay put.

Waking Sleep

While the rest of the house sleeps, I wake up hot and irritable. The television was on, and I fell easily into slumber, waking now and then as my temperature rose. The cats sleep on the bed making squeaky breathing sounds, but I cannot fall back into the comfort of oblivion, and as I sit here struggling to say something pithy, I realize that this too is in vain.
I am stuck with a song in my head. Something happened during the week, and I have had a hard time describing it to the effect I experienced it and I am left with a snappy song in my head.
Sleep on, you restless dreamers.