Insonmnia

After decades of glorious slumber, I've developed insomnia.  Grown-up, real-deal, hours-awake insomnia, days on end and lasting for months.   Needless to say, I am not a fan.  It's particularly galling in light of the fact that my baby is, and has been for a while, an Olympic-caliber sleeper, conking out reliably at 7 PM and rising with startling and somewhat disgruntling cheerfulness twelve hours later.
 
Not being able to settle to sleep sucks, particularly when the change seems to be permanent, and especially when sleep has been, in the past, a wellspring of joy.  I miss, acutely, the delight I used to take in going to bed- as if, every night, I unwrapped the most perfect, most useful, and most personal of gifts.

Now the bed is a bier.  RIP sleep

And yet, life trundles on.  It does so in the face of wakefulness and loss, amidst cancer and paraplegia and climate change and the million other miseries, gnat-sized to elaphantine, comprising the human lot.

We're adaptable beasts.  Even awake.