prowling in my own home

it's past midnight and i can't sleep. after an hour of listening to night noises- a man coughing, two young-sounding women chatting, toilet dripping, a car engine starting, someone's AC humming, a distant bass line throbbing- i get up + make my way down the hallway towards my laptop in the living room. i try to step lightly, but i might as well be stomping, for all the noise it makes. my PR continues to snore.

one of the many things i love about being a grown-up is the ability to get up out of bed at any hour of the night and wander my living space without fear of getting "caught" by my parents. (i haven't lived with my parents for the past 13 years, and yet the memories of their house rules are still embedded in my skin.) in their house, night time was strictly for sleeping. they were in bed by 10:30, so i had to use my best ninja moves after the light went out in their room in order to avoid waking them up. our house was creaky- the floors, walls, + ceilings all sighed so noisily that even if every human in the house was tucked into bed, it still sounded like people were pacing over our heads. (this was a big problem for me + my overactive imagination when i was a kid.) as i got older, i learned how to avoid certain areas of the hallway floor, following an invisible erratic hopscotch path in the carpet that allowed me to move around the house without waking a parent.

my new place in ABQ is creaky too. i've only lived here for a couple of weeks so i'm still trying to figure out the best hopscotch path to take down the hallway. it almost doesn't even matter how much noise i make b/c my PR sleeps like a boulder until daylight enters through the windows. even if he did get up, there'd be no suspicious questioning. (yet i still freeze in my tracks when i hear movement coming from his direction- why is that?) my mom, on the other hand, associates not sleeping at night with mental unease; if i'm not sleeping through the night, something must be bothering me, and she will interrogate me to figure out the source of my sleeplessness. "how are you sleeping?" is one of the standard interview questions in her weekly phone call to me, along with "are you taking enough vitamin C?" and "are you eating fresh fruit?" (my answers are always: "good", "yes", and "yes", regardless of what is actually going on.)


during these sleepless hours of the night, i wonder if i can access regions of my brain that are typically unused during the day. when my brain's fatigued, do the same parts keep churning onwards as long as i'm awake, or does the factory shut down most functions, leaving only a night watchman whose only job is to ensure that everything continues to run- no fancy or complex functions, just the bare minimum? none of the day employees of my brain ever see the night watchman, none of them even give him a second thought as they punch out at sundown and head home with empty lunch pails. but this night watchman, maybe he is a poet, and he uses these night hours to fill page after page in his spiral notebook with brilliant word paintings that no one will ever see. all night long, he reflects on life and people and attempts to translate these musings into verse. and as the first car pulls into the parking lot of my brain at 0630am when my alarm goes off, he flips his notebook closed, tucks it into his back pocket, + heads out the back door.