Romantic Fantasies of an Insomniac

by Amelia Moriarty

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    My sister uses Benadryl. The other a regimented routine of unwinding. My brother relies on melatonin. I’ve tried all 3 plus Xanax, Trazodone, Hydroxyzine, Seroquel, Lunesta, and I’m not allowed benzos. Going the natural route, I’ve tried chamomile/lavender tablets, CBD, THC, avoiding blue light, meditation, hypnosis, counting sheep, books on tape, podcasts, white noise, silk sheets...

    I can expect to wake up about every hour. Sometimes less. On the worst nights, I spend more time getting out of bed, meandering through the hallway and motioning to put myself back to sleep than I do actually sleeping until at least the late hours of the morning when somehow, I doze off under sunbeams after turning off the AC. I awake with an almost painfully rough throat, mouth of sticky saliva and a film of oil over my nose.

    I try to limit this late morning dozing even if it's the deepest sleep I’ll get, in order to exhaust myself enough by evening to minimize those unbearable hours after midnight of continuous interruption or worse, complete absence of slumber. 

    After a cool shower in an air-conditioned bedroom, dim, orange-hued lighting, herbal tea and breathable cotton boxers, I pass gentle hours reading until around midnight I turn off the final light and attempt to nod off. I pass the first hour or so on my back under the blanket listening to an audiobook, set by my pillow. The voice helps to silence any distracting thoughts.

    I used to look forward to this time before sleep precisely as a time for thinking, the type of thinking that is more fantasy than reflection on practical life. In childhood, my fantasizing would blend romance and adventure, a bashful classroom crush transformed to a questing partner across middle earth or the co-captain of my winged flock of other mutant bird children surviving a post-apocalyptic landscape. With such swaddling images I’d drift into deep and peaceful sleep, that delicious uninterrupted kind of which in adulthood I’d pretty much lost all hope of rediscovering, at this rate anyway.

    While I continue to indulge in romantic fantasy, the once luxurious fixation has in the past years begun increasingly to risk the provocation of some practical anxiety, in large part due to the corruption done to the fantasy crush by having descended from the untouchable plane of idealism entered the thorny realm of material reality. Once contained by infantile bashfulness, the conjured interpersonal intensity of a crush could fuel itself for months on as much as accidental eye contact or a close brush in the cafeteria. Upon entering early adulthood, the mundane affairs of college parties coupled with my newfound confidence (en gros, incited by the jarring metamorphosis from emo caterpillar withdrawn from her rural high school to the crowning spectacle of the insular liberal arts campus harboring an entirely alternative/autistic study body) to act upon the foolish impulses of the heart had sullied this purity.

    I lay awake with my audiobook promising myself that I’ll limit my fantasizing to the most abstract sensations of touch and sensual companionship, imagining the ideal bedfellow who’d soothe whatever invisibly taught nerves were so cruelly preventing my descent into slumberland. But inevitably I attach features to this abstraction, features of an earthly crush, someone in particular, and in recalling this someone stir up all the anxieties of how I’d done them wrong and vice-versa as I rolled over and accepted the humiliation or the consequences of miscommunication or the despairing-nature of our drawn-out dead-end affair.

    I gnaw on old memories like a mangy bitch on a bone, sucking out the marrow for any last simulated drop of visceral presence that might trigger the shiver of oxytocin. These memories I partitioned by moments of mere seconds, the momentum of a single embrace, the closing distance of a long-delayed greeting lit by street lamps. I would savor the process of memory reconstruction, slowly staging the scene down to the detail of temperature of lighting, the volume and texture of ambient sound, determining my own position in space and perspective whether from my own eyes or surveying the theater stage from some omnipresent bird’s eye view.

    These precise preparations I prolonged to such lengths as if to delay the final rolling of action, just like how in childhood when I’d pass more hours of play setting up my dollhouse and elaborating on the background of each character than ever executing a scene. I can’t confirm whether this behavior arrives intentionally out of some dread of disappointment or of sapping the memory’s potency with overuse, or merely an unconscious procrastination due to a genuine pleasure in the foreplay.

    Horrified by my early failures in love, halfway convinced of some twisted fate, I had developed the defensive habit of guarding my infatuation as fantasy material while severing any expectations for success in reality.

    The most recent affair (the second core fixation) in which I’d found myself for the first time not only in proximity to a love interest but actually engaged with him, enamorment had un-haltingly catapulted to disastrous ends. Under pressure of time and distance, I’d left him in tears, a tantrum so aggressively pathetic he sent me a long, grave letter before cutting me off completely. For months after self-loathing kept me up at night until I resorted to painkillers to numb the violent urge to tear off my skin.

    Eventually, I moved on, or moved back rather, to my previous romantic obsession as established during my freshman year of college as revealed to me in a dream over the winter break in which the lanky, overbearing posture of my flirtatious yet hitherto platonic companion impressed upon my dream-self such a visceral sense of bodily security I knew immediately upon awakening the topography of my romantic landscape had changed forever. His oneiric form would continue appearing to me years after geographic separation as the Jungian archetype I came to identify as my animus, the male part of the female psyche representing in this case primarily emotional stability and solidity of character, giving a sort of incestuous tilt to the attachment. The interpretation stemmed from the aspect of profound self-identification and intimate kinship that characterized each of my subsequent romantic attachments and perhaps offered some foreshadowing into my later inclination for codependency.

    Despite taking refuge in this distant fantasy, I remained forever haunted by the failure to pass through a rupture without myself detonating into such emotion as to burn the bridge altogether, especially as numerous times since had arisen the chance to again cross paths, if only in all intents and purposes I’d not burned this point of contact from my map of potentiality.

    Now laying, night after restless night, tossing about in bed, I envision a precious lover whose tender presence alone might rip the red tape from the dreamland elevator and push me through the veil into deep slumber.

    Only recently, after years now it has been, did a third person arise into this barren yet heady landscape approaching hallucination (among the slew of sleeping medications was a prescription for anti-psychotics).

    Another ghost, in fact, one returned beyond any shadow of expectation. Amid summer floods, only shortly after the national covid curfew had been lifted, we’d stalked the marshy Paris catacombs arm-in-arm. A slavic boy a whole half-foot too tall for the runway, I’d recovered his skeletal frame yet again under pressure of time and distance. The polarity between spark and crunch held me paralyzed by the apprehension of inevitable calamity, gripped with the weight of each minor interaction to potentially trigger our doom. If after all I had any free will, if I’d learned anything from my pathetic trials, the subsequent events would stand as the test.

    Rather than seduction or conquest, my sense of achievement consisted in evading an emotional unwinding, an unwinding which would reveal myself as a helpless infant or repellent beast. With this precious aim, my taught nerves held my fragile heart in check. My brain–caught between anxiety and aspiration–I attempted to mute altogether through delayed reactions taking time to breath and move, to creative distance in order to find perspective.

    Without warning, at long last, after I’d avoided communication on a departure flight for good, the conditions arose for a reunion. The sudden promise even for a second chance filled me with such anticipation I nearly burst. I waited each day for a response, a signal of recognition, his word to meet at last if only for a moment of proximity in the material world. The final disappointment sent me reeling, I sent back two rapid responses out of this mix of hurt, shock and despair. Simultaneous to texting, I’d been immersed in my ideal crowd in the ideal environment but left at the first chance, suddenly on the verge of tears. I sniffled in the street, holding myself together until under the shelter of the bus stop to burst into silent tears to the dismay of the two fellow attendants. The tears brought some relief. I repeated to myself the insignificance of the entire affair, belittling my expectations, dismissing the disappointment and seeking every excuse for such apparently appalling behavior and mistreatment until finally hit with a fear I deleted the messages. I knew I should never have sent the first two even as I wrote them. I sought stillness on the bus. Once home, I sent out a mellow apology that the timing hadn’t been right. I poured myself into the pillow, now at full, heaving, wrenching volume, full abandonment to self-pity and the simple tragedy of dashed hopes.

    Gradually, aided by the primordial salve of time’s ceaseless advance, I came to realize the great success in having averted absolute doom. Even if I’d all the same emanated a certain level of erratic, even deranged behavior, I’d avoided total hysteria. I was merely a sensitive girl, easily set off balance but learning all by herself to soothe and recover internal harmony. This simple realization brought me no small amount of pleasure and even pride. As geographic distance asserted itself between us (he transferred to a program in Prague while I accepted a contract in China), I moved on with my own adventure secure in the idea that this boy remained curious about me and if ever our locations of residence coincided, he would be available. I’d not burned him from my map.

    Despite my peaceful resolution, rarely in the late-night bowels of insomniac prison did I recover his image as that perfect soothing presence. The affair had been too recent and too real, too closely tied with the material world. Rather, I returned to the first of the three, the animus. I returned to that most long and drawn-out infatuation, still yet to grow weary even after years of so little contact.

    Red-eyed and weary, facing the eternity of another sleepless night, I withdraw into the mind-palace where I wrap myself in those arms most certain to never again enter my life in any substantial form, but conversely, far less at risk of ever evaporating completely or in any way provoking a major heartbreak. 

    When at last, I finally nod off for a momentary dip into dreamland, he too is the presence that visits me time and time again out of all the rest.


Amelia Moriarty is an artist based in Paris.