rebound insomnia cocoa: a recipe
Tuesday 8 January 2008 | I like a cookie
1. Run out of Lunesta. Have 2 tablets left and a pdoc appointment 5 days from now. Hoard remaining tablets in case pdoc doesn’t work out and you need them desperately next week for Monday and Wednesday nights, because you are teaching Tuesday and Thursday and already have woken yourself up explaining the syllabus to imaginary students.
2. Take a long hot bath. Know that this will not work.
3. Tuck Brujo into bed at 11 pm. Come into study. Try to resign yourself to never sleeping again. Drag the feather absently across the carpet for Pyewacket, thrilled, to chase.
4. Play on computer dully for several hours. Try to write non-poem. The opposite of dark purple is smoke. In my language, to say ‘many’ we say ‘please.’ Etc. Write other things than the things you meant to write. Think about nightmares. Why are exes in dreams always so judgmental? Don’t they have anything positive to say? Manage not to sleep-order cashmere sweater currently on sale at LL Bean for only $49, because you live in Arizona and you do not need it.
5. At 3 am palliate Pyewacket with kibble and slip into bed beside Brujo, who gets up to pee, grumbling, then subsides into breathy sleep once more. Lie so motionless that you feel your muscles tensing. Deliberately relax them. Think about: warm melted wax, honey, sand on the beach. Listen to the clunky sounds of nighttime construction on the light rail down the street. The beeping as backhoes or bulldozers drive backward. Count your breaths backward from 100. Tell yourself it’s restful just to lie still in the dark. Wait until your shoulder begins to hurt and your arm goes numb.
6. Give up. Get up. Turn up the heat momentarily for white noise, tell the confused but eager dog to go back to bed, it’s not morning, and silently, silently, giving thanks that for four years you were a more or less compulsively driven Zen student, get out a small saucepan, the milk, a spoon, the bag of unbleached sugar you buy every year for campfire-baked apples in Mexico and otherwise never use, and the canister of Dagoba chocolate which was inexplicably in the 99¢ basket at Sunflower Market.
7. Open canister noiselessly with spoon. Wonder why, since you are the quietest person you know, your Zen teacher is still so judgmental of you in your dreams.
8. Heat milk on stove without stirring, because stirring would be noisy. While it approaches scalding, crush together 2 tablespoons of chocolate and 3 tablespoons of sugar in the turquoise Anthropologie café au lait bowl from Z. Realize as you do so that you have made enough for two cups of cocoa and pour half of it into the pink Anthropologie bowl for later.
9. When milk surface skims with tiny frothy bubbles and warm smell rises, turn off heat and pour milk awkwardly and slowly into bowl, realizing belatedly that you need a whisk and that you can’t pour and whisk at the same time. Do your best, also realizing that a drip of vanilla and almond flavoring would be nice. Add these, wondering why the almond glycerin (alcohol-free flavoring, because of Mandarin’s celiac disease and the Brujo’s alcoholism) has a smudge of suspicious dark green stuff around the cap.
10. Lick drips of milk from the saucepan rim, singeing your tongue. Gulp at the too-full bowl of cocoa and singe it further. Fill milky pan with cold water and leave in sink, hoping it does not attract palmetto bugs before arrival of fake-environmental exterminator at 8 am.
11. Return to study, turning off now-oppressive central heat (72 degrees, ugh–back down to 65) and wondering why Pyewacket keeps retching as if she has swallowed part of her feather. Determine that she has in fact swallowed part of a feather, that it will neither go down nor come up, and be unable to figure out what to do about it. Get cat spit all over fingers and piss off cat until she eventually turns her back on you with finality and goes to sleep.
12. Drink chocolate down to sludgy residue. Wonder if anyone has ever tried to read future in unmelted lumps of chocolate. Remind yourself to send 2 additional canisters of Dagoba chocolate to Mom and Mandarin, who will both appreciate it.
13. Write sleepless blogpost at 5 am.
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