Slowly the comfort of dark shifts, and I rise atop a thin consciousness that warns me; there’s no turning back. The room is still shadowed in the cloak of night, all lights out, all but the red staring eye of the television.

I stretch, yawn and curse the evil that drags me up from rest each night, making me aware of being too hot or too cold, too far from my lover or too close. A cat stirs at the bottom of the bed and I see her inky form stretch, turn and amble towards me. It’s the young one; Cricket. She puts her eleven pounds next to my chest, curls up and goes back to sleep, her gravelly purr rumbling in the quiet.

I pull the covers up, turn on my side, and wish for sleep to clamp my eyes shut before they start to focus, before my brain realizes that my mind is trying to think and cranks up the gears. Too late…I’m thinking of what to eat for breakfast in the morning. A car goes by too fast, hits the bump in the street by our house with its underbelly, and skims my window with its headlights. It feels like it should be two or three o clock, the wee hours as they say. I need to know so that I can worry about how much sleep I’m missing, so I reach for my iPad…its twelve fifty-five!

Well, since I already have the iPad open, I might as well do something with it, so I go to Ikea’s website to look at frames. I want to start sorting my photographs and getting them ready for printing and framing. A quick ten minutes later however, I’m crushing candy, planting corn and cotton, feeding chickens, clearing land, loading trains, matching cards and playing pool.

I have the sheet pulled over the iPad to dull the glare so that I don’t disturb my partner, who, God bless her, is sleeping like a log. It’s not dim enough however to hide from my older cat Zora, who is maniacally addicted to laying across the device as soon as she sees it open. She clambers up, stands in the space abandoned by Cricket a few minutes earlier, pushes her head under the sheet and starts trying to kidnap my digital companion in this wretched sleeplessness.

After much pushing and my whispered admonishments, she gives up and sits her eight pound self on my hip. The AC comes alive, chills the air and breaks the silence. I consider closing the iPad and trying to call the gods of sleep to carry me away but instead, my head starts filling up with words and sentences that beg for escape. So, here I am, lying with a sheet over my head at 4:17AM, a cat on my hip, my leg cramping up, my stomach fully awake and wanting food, and no sleep on the horizon.

Silver light will soon creep under the blinds and I’ll give up and grumble my way to the Keurig. I’ll stand there listening to it gurgle and spit, take my mug of coffee back into bed, and marvel at my lack of tiredness. Maybe I’ll have better luck in 16 hours.