*or*
The Big Disconnect.
I miss the crickets while laying in bed early one Wednesday morning. I haven’t slept in two days. Sleep, that elusive, fickle lover of mine has once again shown its coquettish ways by allowing me a fitful doze with the promise of real slumber... almost. What wakes me this time is my father’s cough.
My father would wake before anyone else in the house. His two-pack-a-day-habit was my alarm clock. I would open my eyes every morning to that ferocious coughing. It wasn’t a sick man’s cough, it was *fierce*. Almost like my father forced his lungs to get that sissy crap out of their system because the day was starting and he had shit to do. I was always startled by the violence of it.
What startled me out of sleep this time was to hear my father’s cough coming from me.
Pa would always get up while it was still dark. A real dark- a dark I haven’t experienced since leaving home. I grew up in the swamps of northern Minnesota, on Nah-Gah-Chi-Wa-Nong reservation (ou Fond du Lac si vous préférez) which is about a million miles away from anything. There was only one store called, aptly, Nahgahchiwanong adaawewigaamig. I still giggle when I visit home and watch white people try to write out checks while they’re tourist-ing for indians.
(Tangents are the curse of the two day non-sleeper. Every time I blink it feels like a week went by with this ritalin-riddled four year old I have running around my brain. Anywho.)
Maybe it’s the simpler time I’m remembering and missing. A time when my father would hand me lit cigarettes to light contraband fireworks to flare in the dark. A time when we kept a loaded .22 by the door to shoot stray rez dogs along with a trashcan lid and a stick to scare bears out of the garage. I’ve never been afraid of the dark.
People in the city can’t appreciate the idea of true dark. They can’t even comprehend it. It’s dark, darker than anything. Sometimes you can’t see your own hand in front of your face and everything is a stark, nameless void. Other times, the stars are that much brighter for it and your eyes still sparkle long after you’ve looked away. And the noise. The dark is not a silent place. Where I’m from, the crickets outnumber the stars and you can’t hear your own thoughts over their trilling din. I’ve never been alone in the dark. I’m not afraid of the dark.
In fact, (I think while tangled up in my sheets) if I still lived on rez I could fix this. I would go outside right now and sit on the cold concrete steps in my blanket. I wouldn’t have to close my eyes or stay my mind. Eventually, after enough time had passed- I would say (in no particular direction, to no specific entity):
“Oh... hi universe.”
And then, without sadness, resignation, surprise, or any sort of moody, martyrish connotations:
“...it’s *me*. Isn’t it.”
I bet I’d sleep like a baby after that.