Adventures in Sleeping and Not Sleeping

I came home to find Jake asleep. His laptop was still open on the dining room table. The TV was still on, tuned to Anderson Cooper, on mute. And every 10 minutes, his cell phone alarm would go off and he would roll over, murmur and then shut it off. At a certain point in one of those moments between alarm and snooze, he became aware I'd come home and assured me that he was only taking a nap. It was already 11pm. Perhaps we had a night of midnight frolicking ahead of us, but more likely, the nap would become the sleep. I convinced him that there was no point in getting up and back he went to sleep.

I have always had a hard time with sleep. I like to think of it as a state of inertia. When I am awake, I have a hard time shifting to sleep. And when I am asleep, I can sleep like the dead until far into the afternoon. I have lain awake, frantically trying to calm my body, until 5am, rising every so often for warm milk, peanut butter, yoga and Google searches of what cures insomnia. And I have slept through exams, appointments, work, rehearsals, my freshman-year Japanese midterm... slipping back into consciousness, rolling over and checking the clock and being shocked to find it is hours after I was supposed to wake up. How startling to hit snooze once... twice... and then find that it is suddenly and alarmingly (pun intended) three in the afternoon.

Besides these frantic moments, I have visceral memories of trying desperately to stay awake, of being mad at myself for falling asleep or staying asleep. Last nights of vacation, last nights before the end of college, last nights with best friends or boyfriends or family members where you knew you had to say goodbye in the morning... I would angrily try to convince my body that these moments of happiness were worth it but my body disagreed. My body let me sleep and in the morning, when the time I had thought we had was gone, I would feel betrayed by my own inner clock. What does it matter now, whether I slept at midnight or 2 or 4? In the long run, why do I still remember those moments as defeat at my own hand? Time would pass regardless. Staying awake wouldn't have stopped the morning from coming... although I guess I wouldn't know, since I always fell asleep before I could find out.