Two Hours

Let’s start with some background:
Let's get started:

a) I have terrible insomnia.

b) I now take pills for said sleeplessness, which occasionally help.
I try to keep a pretty tight go-to-bed schedule during the week, because if I awake in the night and can’t get back to sleep (often) at least I got a few hours under my belt ahead of time.

c) Generally, the boy initiates all phone contact. I’m weirdly old-fashioned this way.

d) The time difference between the boy and me is two hours.

You wouldn’t think that two hours is such a huge difference in time. And for the most part, it isn’t. Two hours. The difference between 9am and 11am isn’t very substantial, especially if you’re at school or at work. The only time I really notice time is when the seasons change. For example, right now I’m noticing that the days seem longer. The extension of sunlight makes me dream of the time change, when sunshine will be around even longer.

(An aside: lack of sunlight makes me a bit odder than usual.)

I generally get home around six and am happily ensconced in TV shows by seven. Around eight, I take my sleeping pill and I’m usually in bed around nine or nine-thirty. I know it sounds regimented, but it’s just what works best for me. Yes, I do allow for changes in the schedule; it’s just that they rarely happen. Such is a glamorous life of a single, poor thirty-six-year-old. (Try to contain your envy.)

(Another aside: I’m not totally lame. I was up until four am Friday night!)

To the point! I can hear you mumbling. Fine. When it gets to be about seven-thirty or eight at night, I’m working on the wind-down process. I’m starting to think about what to tell the boy about my day, what silly thing happened, or just whatever random topics we might discuss. After a month of him being busy most nights and me getting eight-minute short-and-sweet conversations, I’ve been looking forward to some extra time with him. The problem is the time difference. For me, seven forty-five is getting up there in time. If we’re going to have any meaningful conversation, it needs to get going already. But for him, it’s not even six and what’s the big deal? I totally get where he’s coming from and I totally get that I’m probably the BIGGEST CONTROL FREAK you’ve ever taken the time to read about, but it still gets to me. In my defense, he is notorious for calling me while in transit and then having to let me go.

So it didn’t help this morning when I checked my messages and the boy left one, just before ten, that said, essentially, how ridiculous it is that I’m asleep already.

Ten? Isn’t ten a reasonable time to be asleep? Assuming I do sleep through the night, (hah!) that’s eight hours of sleep, and isn’t that normal? And if it’s a typical night for me, at three in the morning I am wide awake and raring to…go back to sleep, but I can’t. That leaves me with five hours of sleep, and feeling more than a bit dopey from lack of sleep and that weird sleeping-pill hangover. From there I am expected to be on my toes from about seven thirty in the morning until about five thirty at night, which is not easy to do. Rinse and repeat. The lack of sleep catches up with you, and even better, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

And that’s why two hours is a bigger deal than you think.