Some things written while waiting for science to happen.

1.

Sometime during eleventh grade, I woke up and thought that I could never sleep in my bed again.

It wasn’t that the bed was uncomfortable, or the room too stuffy, or that I had nightmares. I simply could not sleep there anymore. So I gathered my blankets and curled up on the floor for the hour I had before the alarm went off. I never fell back asleep.

My mother was surprised when she went into my room Saturday morning to wake me up before I slept the day away and I wasn’t there. She found me in the guest room, happily dozing between the starchy sheets no one else would put on their beds.

“What are you doing?” she exclaimed. After I’d woken up properly and come enough to my senses, she repeated herself.

“I couldn’t sleep,” I explained. “So I thought I’d try moving beds, and it worked.”

She accepted this well enough, but scolded me when she found me on the couch the next day.

“Why are you doing this?” she asked several mornings later, when I had curled up in an armchair for the night. “Why can’t you sleep like a normal child? You’re hurting your back!”

In truth, the chair had done terrible things for my neck. “My back feels fine. I just can’t sleep when I’m in my room.” It wasn’t a lie.

Months passed and I began sleeping anywhere that looked even remotely soft. I camped out on carpets and every couch in the house. The guest room was practically my second bedroom. On weekends when I could sleep in, I would wake up early with the rest of the family and fall back asleep, stealing my parents’ and brother’s beds when they’d vacated it. I even tried padding the bathtub with blankets and sleeping there, but the faucet dripped onto my feet. My brother and father would tease me, and my mother would complain, but my grades in school were still good and I still practiced piano daily and improved my rank in tennis. The jokes became banal and the complaints withered into grudging nods of approval.

Around midterms my friend Judith developed terrible insomnia. Her parents sent her to a psychiatrist so she could handle stress and still make good grades in all her advanced classes and volunteer twelve hours a week at the hospital and get into a good college.

I told this to my mother. “That’s a good idea,” she said. “You should volunteer too.”

Judith’s sessions continued into winter break. For Christmas, my parents bought me a mattress pad I could sleep on wherever I wanted in the house. I started walking dogs on the weekends for an animal shelter. My mother looked into sending me to Mexico for spring break so I could build houses or teach English or assist doctors.

I still used my room like a normal person, aside from the sleeping part. I used my computer for essays and an online SAT class, and sat at my desk to study textbooks and notes. I relaxed in the rocking chair my mother used to read me bedtime stories from and read classic novels, making annotations in the margins for class discussions later. Each night I laid out my school uniform and, when appropriate, my tennis uniform on the unused bed.

Spring came, and I tried sleeping outside. I imagined myself lying out in the grass with the stars above my head and making up my own constellations. But the sky was a dull, nameless color, and all I could see were so many streetlights, the neighbors’ flood lights, and the somber glow of downtown on the horizon. A tiny unwanted shaving of the moon, like the wax discarded from cheese, was all I had.

I didn’t go to Mexico for spring break, but I visited three in-state colleges.

I did forty points better than the goal my mother had set for me on the SAT, and she bought better sheets for the guest room.

Summer came, and I kept myself busy with a psychology course at a community college. Before class I would explore the library, and after class, I would take practice essays for college applications to the college’s writing lab. In the evenings when it cooled off, I kept up practicing tennis and took practice SAT subject tests with my window open. I slacked off piano practice, and my mother chastised me.

“You don’t practice, so your brother won’t practice,” she whined.

“He wants to play the guitar, anyway,” I replied.

She said, “He can do that is his spare time.”

“Like my tennis?” I asked.

“Exactly.” I didn’t like tennis.

I made an A in psychology and my mother complained less about piano, although she would periodically buy sheet music and leave it on my desk. I did my summer reading on plane rides to visit more colleges. I made sure to ask thoughtful questions and make a good impression at all of them. I realized our country is beautiful. I wrote an essay about it, including cameos from a three legged dog I walked and my wise grandmother who never bothered to learn English. I had never met her.

School started again, and I bought all-new supplies on sale. I dumped them on my bed and left them there for days because I still wasn’t using it. My favorite sleeping spot had become a corner of the living room, with the guest bed in a close second. I never slept in the same place twice in a row.

On the second day of class, a teacher caught me with my head on the desk.

“Isn’t it a little early in the year to be falling asleep?” she teased. I sat up to show her I had still been taking notes.

“No, ma’am,” I said. “I would never sleep in class.”



2.

Robert was a tree, and it baffled him that he could not see.

It started one day as he was reaching his branches up toward the sun, toward warm and pleasant, and he remembered that the sky was blue. The sky was blue, and so were the rain and the violets. Yet how could that be, if he had never seen them? And for that matter, how did he know the sky was there at all?

Robert called to the grass, “What color is the sky?”

The grass called back, “Blue like clear water, of course.”

“How do you know?” asked Robert.

The grass answered, “Because that is what blue is. It is the sky and water and birds and flowers. Everyone knows that.”

A crow had overheard them, and it cackled the way crows do. “You silly green things!” it said, landing on Robert. “You don’t know anything. Water is only blue sometimes, and only some birds are blue.”

The grass quivered in anger. “How could you say this!” it demanded. “Everyone knows that this is what blue is. This is why we have the word blue.”

The crow’s eyes glinted wickedly down at the grass. “Then what color do you think I am, you fool?” it asked.

The grass did not answer. Robert said, “Some birds are blue, but you are not. You are a crow, and so you are black.”

“This is why we have the word black,” muttered the grass. “It is crows and spiders and the centers of eyes.”

“Ha!” cackled the crow. “What do you know of eyes?”

Again, the grass did not answer. Robert said, “Crow, is your beak yellow?”

“No, you silly tree,” answered the crow. “Did you not hear what the silly grass said? I am black. Your blindness makes you so stupid!” And he flew away, cackling the way crows do.

“Yellow is the sun,” whispered the grass.

After a while, Robert wondered, “What if the crow is lying?”

The grass answered sulkily, “Why would he? He can see and we cannot. It is crueler to tell the truth, and he is a cruel creature.”

“Have you ever felt the sky?” asked Robert.

The grass fluttered about helplessly in the wind and said, “Who has ever felt the sky? But it must be there, because we have the word ‘sky,’ and if it was not, there would be nothing and no word.”

That night it stormed. The wind howled, the thunder crashed, and rain spilled down on Robert. He wailed, “Grass! Where does the storm come from?”

The grass screamed back, “From black clouds! Black like the crow and spiders and centers of eyes!”

Robert called back, “Then what is the color of the storm?”

If the grass answered, he could not hear it over the moaning and gnashing of the gale.

In the morning, the sun’s warmth found its way down to earth again, and Robert stretched in its heat. Morning birds were singing the way mornings bird do, and Robert heard a soft weeping.

“Grass, whatever is wrong?” he asked.

The grass was wilting in shame. “I know so many words, but I know not to what they belong.”

Robert said, “Yes you do. You know that blue is the sky, yellow is the sun, black is spiders–”

“That is all useless!” cried the grass. “How can I know what these are if I have never seen them? What is a song that I have never heard? What is a mountain that I have never climbed? What is the sky that I have never flown across? We live in a pool of ignorance.”

Robert did not answer, but the sun felt cool on his leaves.

When the sun was straight above and at its strongest, the crow returned to take refuge from its blaze in Robert’s branches. As it was picking at its wings, Robert suddenly announced, “I know sadness must be real for I can feel it.”

The crow cackled the way crows do. “You fool! Things do not exist simply because you can feel them. The horizon can never be touched, yet it is always there. Even if you felt joy, someone else will always feel sadness.”

“Surely some days everyone is happy,” muttered the grass.

“Ha! Ha! Ha!” crackled the crow the way crows do. “This will never happen, because I will always be here to make you miserable!” And it dove from Robert the grass, and began tearing it from the earth. “Ha! Ha! Ha!”

The grass cried, for it was grass, and it could do nothing.

“Crow! Stop!” wailed Robert, but he was a tree and he too could do nothing. And as his friend was mauled before him, he felt his sorrow grow and spread throughout all of him, through his roots so that it seemed to seep out into the ground, and up through branches into his leafs, where it oozed out into the sun. He felt all of himself at once, and every miniscule piece ached.

When there were almost no blades of grass left around Robert, the crow guffawed and flew away. The grass whimpered pathetically. It would grow, and it would be torn to pieces again.

The days passed, and the grass was silent and withered away. Robert thought about how brown is the color of dead grass and tree trunks so riddled with misery that beetles would not burrow into it and even fallen leaves seemed to hurt.

He cried, for his friend was dead, and he could at last see himself.

(I don't get it either.)