The transition between insomnia and sleep is unknowable.
We can’t see the portal before we pass through it—and there we are, in the promised land! We can’t savor its pleasures while we’re there, but only know we’ve been there when we pass the other way through the door and find ourselves awake.
I heard somewhere that a sure-fire way to defeat insomnia is to count backwards, in your head, from 300—and voilà!—you’ll be in dreamland well before you reach 0. My little insurance policy is to do the trick in French, because the French make counting so complicated—which makes it much harder for one’s anxious thoughts to find space among all those synapses silently firing, making connections.
On some nights, it doesn’t work. My eyes snap open and I interrupt my countdown, wondering if there actually is a French word for 70—that it’s not 60 [+] 10, in the same way that 80 is “four twenties.” And for awhile in the the counting, I use a word I’ve imagined might be the French word for 70—70, my age now.
Like an AI robot, I’ve hallucinated the word—or maybe I remembered it from another life in Canada, Switzerland or Belgium, where that’s how they say seventy: septante.
Stop being such a pedant, I tell myself as I crane my head to glance at the clock over my husband’s sleeping body, and start over again at 300.
My French is good but, historically, I’ve always had trouble with French numbers, often failing to understand the price a salesperson has told me—and needing them to write it down.
Wayne often chides me for being what he calls “a relentless self-improver.”
But why shouldn’t I keep trying to learn while I’m lying sleepless in bed, knowing from his breathing (and occasional snoring) that he’s just where I’d like to be now.
Why can’t I find the doorway?
Using the long-winded way of counting backwards to 60 from 79, with every number containing a little addition problem—plus the gratification of those special words for 11, 12, 13, 14 and 15 that suddenly give way to “ten-six,” “ten-seven” and so on, up to 20—I imagine my own best French pronunciation in my head, rich with properly voiced sounds: the uvular fricative of every word containing an R. The nasalized vowels.
I correct my silent voice when it fails to match up to the voices of native French speakers I’ve had as friends through the years. I tell myself not to be lazy as I stumble along a treacherous path through a pitch-black landscape, desperate to find the portal to sleep again.
No wonder we speak of falling asleep! Is it a sinkhole beneath my feet that will suddenly give way without my ever knowing it was there?
Is it a passageway in the air made of Dark Matter, leading to the land of dreams or the Life Between Lives?
On some miserable nights, I don’t manage to find it. The sky grows light, and I know I’ll be a wreck for the rest of the day.
Many people I know use marijuana gummies as a sleep aid. Unfortunately, the stuff has a paradoxical effect on me: it fills me with energy and determination to get things done. (I guess I should try sometime to use it during the day—especially on a day following a night of insomnia.)
Last night, after the umpteenth time I woke to pee, I reached 100 in my countdown—and despaired that I wouldn’t fall asleep before I ran out of numbers.
Is the transition between being alive and being dead similarly unknowable?
I sometimes think about the story of my old boyfriend’s Spanish father-in-law, who, while sitting on the couch, suddenly exclaimed, “Mierda! Estoy muerto!” And then, just as suddenly, he was dead.
He saw the portal before he fell through it. But that, I think, must be very rare.
As a nation, we’ve fallen though a portal from our always-aspiring democracy into a dictatorship as dark as any that’s ever grown in the petri dish of human experience.
Or maybe not yet—the darkest deeds have only just begun. We’re transfixed while the horrors unfold. We feel as powerless as the insomniac stumbling along the treacherous path on a moonless night.
We can hear wolves howling. We startle as the night birds light on the branches overhead.
Bumblebees Will I have the chance to speak with you again after this lifetime is done? I’ve been watching the newborn leaves emerge from the dry branches of the trees. Watching great gowns of blossoms danced to life by the chilly wind—towering magnolias, pink and white. Just when I was running out of hope, a bluebird dropped from the azure sky like a puzzle piece, like a love-note onto the spring-green sloping lawn. I long for sleep and dread it, too, wanting so much to hold you in my gaze while I can. Wanting to tell you how much you mean to me, to sing you the song of my gratitude. Listen to the bumblebees ravishing the ancient cherry trees. Their fat blossoms fill the air like snow. Just weeks ago, their branches were covered in ice and it seemed that life would never stir again inside them. Let me be like the leaves and the blossoms, the bluebird and the grass, and husband my vitality through all the months of winter’s siege. Let my love for you one day drop from the sky like a bluebird, wings outstretched, like the puzzle piece you never thought you’d find. Let my love for you resound like a thousand bumblebees in the echoing halls of your heart, long after the dancers have all gone home. Copyright ©️ 2025 by Barbara Quick
Go to the SubStack app to leave a comment or send me a heart to pack in my suitcase…
gorgeous poem!