Trembling With Fear 2-9-25

The Underlying Cause of Her Insomnia, by P.A. Cornell

I lie in bed doing the math. A week-and-a-half now where I can’t sleep more than an hour or two a night, if I manage to sleep at all. I’ve tried everything: pills, counting down from a thousand, even drinking fucking warm milk! Nothing helps. 

My work’s starting to suffer too. I can’t concentrate on anything. Yesterday I missed my bus stop and was twenty minutes late. My boss isn’t going to put up with much more of this. 

The hours are eternal as I wait for dawn to come. When it finally does, I’m too exhausted to shower. I throw on some clothes and I’m out the door. No coffee even. Caffeine doesn’t help anyway, it just makes me jittery. 

As I leave, I run into Adam, my neighbor, out in the hall.

“There’s my dream girl,” he says.

I must have a confused look on my face so he goes on.

“I’m sorry, Katherine, that came off creepy. You were just in one of my dreams again last night.”

He’s told me this before, though I don’t remember exactly when. Maybe earlier this week? My memory’s been off. Now he’s telling me about the latest dream but I’m not really listening. My focus has shifted to how much I envy him. If he’s dreaming, that means he’s sleeping. Soundly. He’s probably getting a full eight hours every night and waking refreshed. I don’t even remember what that’s like. God, I’d kill for eight hours of uninterrupted sleep.

He stops talking so I nod like I’ve heard what he’s saying and he smiles. 

“So, it’s a date then?” 

It hits me that I’ve agreed to go out with him or something. Adam’s harmless and I know he has a thing for me but I don’t feel the same way. Shit. How do I get out of this? I play along for the moment.

“So then…”

“My apartment; say seven?” he says. “Late dinner.”

I nod.

“Purely platonic,” he adds, no doubt sensing my awkwardness. “No pressure.”

“Sure.”

I wave to him as I leave, hating myself for giving him any kind of hope. He’s a decent guy, Adam. He doesn’t deserve to think he has a shot. If I wasn’t so tired, I could’ve said something to get me out of this. Now I’ll have to dwell on it all, wracking my exhausted brain to come up with an excuse. As if I didn’t have enough to deal with.

I get to work with no clear memory of the journey, but at least I’m on time. Tina’s in too. She comes by my cubicle to share the daily gossip. I have nothing to add, so I tell her about my accidental date, thinking maybe she can help me get out of it. 

“Poor guy,” she says. “You’ll have to let him down gently. If I were you, I’d just have dinner with him. He said it was friendly anyway. Then while you’re eating and making small talk, maybe slip in that you’re seeing someone. Or that you’re taking a break from dating to focus on your career.”

I nod. “What I really want to do is skip the date and go to bed early. I’m dying. I can’t even think straight anymore.” I tap the screen with my pen to show her what I’ve been working on. It’s an obvious mess, even to me.

“And that’s not even the worst of it,” I tell her. “Even simple things are getting tough to manage. I don’t even know how long I was brushing my teeth for this morning before I noticed I hadn’t used any toothpaste. I hear if you don’t get enough sleep you can start to go kind of crazy—hallucinating and stuff like that. If I don’t get some sleep soon, I feel like that’s where I’m headed.”

“You poor thing,” she says. “If it makes you feel any better, they say when you can’t sleep it’s because you’re awake in someone else’s dreams.”

It doesn’t make me feel any better.

She goes on to spread more office gossip and I nod along but I’m really just thinking about getting through another day without messing up enough to get canned.

###

On the bus ride home, I make up my mind to just be straight with Adam. Tell him I’m not into him and that I’m sorry but I can’t have dinner because I need to get some sleep. I miss my stop again and I have to double back on foot a few blocks, reaching my building later than I’d hoped.

I knock on the door across the hall and after a second, Adam opens it, holding a steak knife. I smell the aromatics wafting through the door and my stomach rumbles. Stomachs don’t care about sleep. I wonder what was on the menu. He probably told me but I’d obviously tuned out if he did.

“Hey,” I start. He smiles and I take in the lack of dark circles and puffiness. He looks alert, happy. Nothing like my face in the mirror. Suddenly I’m overwhelmed with hatred for him and everyone else who’s getting enough sleep. It’s all I can do to keep from slapping him. I take a deep breath instead and as I do, the conversation with Tina flashes back into my head and I think again about Adam telling me about his dreams. A glimmer of hope begins to form in my mind and I smile. “I hope I’m not too early.”

“Not at all. Come in.”

###

Back in my apartment, I’m too beat for much more. I place the steak knife on my nightstand and slide under the bed covers still in my blood-soaked clothes. I wipe the sticky, red substance that coats my hands on the sheets as best I can and figure I’ll just soak them in cold water tomorrow. 

Closing my eyes, I think about how maybe now with Adam gone, I can finally spend some time in my own dreams.