Insomnia, the early days.

This is from a post on Myspace on Feb. 2006. I no longer use Myspace hence the need to move my deeply moving philosophical treatises to some other forum... ta-da!

Insomnia - The early days

It is now 4:05 am (EST)and as usual, I am not asleep. I know quite well I will be very tired in the morning and throughout the day tomorrow/today but that simply adds to my frustration.

I have very few memories of my childhood in Afghanistan, but one of the most vivid is of a particular day in kindergarten. I was perhaps barely four years old at the time and was expected to, along with my classmates, to take a nap in the afternoon.

I distinctly remember the sleeping mats strewn around the floor as the curtains were drawn against the sunlight. My classmates were in various states of sleep, some deeply slumbering, others still valiantly fighting to stay awake but failing as they stretched and yawned and finally, mumbling to themselves, slept.

I watched my classmates closest to me as their chests rose and fell, fascinated by the very act of sleeping, if sleeping could be considered an action. Everyone breathed differently, everyone slept differently, limbs stretched out or tucked neatly into their bodies, some breathing softly in a steady rhythm, others in spurts, some quickly, and some so slowly I thought they may be dead.

Fascinated, I tried to match my breathing with the child closest to me and ended up hyperventilating. (I still do this sometimes, it is quite unnatural to try and match your breathing to another persons and it is incredibly difficult to sustain.)

At any rate, I hyperventilated and started coughing because, quite frankly, I thought I was dying. The teacher, an Afghan lady whose daughter was also in the kindergarten, came over to see what the noise was about.

She saw me wide awake, recovering from my little experiment, my classmates blissfully asleep around me in the semi-darkness. In a manner typical of Afghan child rearing skills, the teacher leaned over me and before I knew it, slapped my face, leaving my ears ringing and the side of my head stinging. I cried out in surprise and was yanked up while a fierce angry voice hissed that I should go to sleep or else.

I closed my eyes and suppressed the sobs burning up the back of my throat.

I did not sleep.