Amateur Insomniac

by Aaron Baird

"Plenty of time to sleep when you're dead," my friend always tells me. It's the amateur insomniacs' credo, ascribed to by those who choose not to sleep, as opposed to those who can't.  An absurd statement in the harsh light of day, the truth of it can only be known in the hours before dawn when the Sun's realities are a distant memory and seem destined to never touch the Earth again.

In a greasy-spoon diner, I sit with a friend.  It's one of the few habitats allotted to the amateur insomniac, an escape from the vampires and muggers that prowl the night, where the terminally bored are lured with the promise of coffee twenty-four hours a day.  Who the friend is and what we talk about seem incidental.  Our conversation blends with the drone of diner commotion: the clink of plates, the yell of orders, the ding and grind of the cash register.  The many pots of coffee I've ingested allow me to hear this symphony with pristine clarity.  My eyelids quiver with the amount of caffeine racing through my veins.  Idly, I wonder if a person can die of a caffeine overdose.  The coffee isn't even that good.  It has a burnt taste to it, as if someone dropped a charcoal briquette in with the grounds.  Well, I'm not drinking it for the taste.  I'm drinking it for warmth and the explosion of smell I know will happen when the waitress refills my cup.

A match flicks behind me and a woman lights a clove cigarette.  The smell commingles with the aroma pouring from my cup.  Individually, I find the bitterness of coffee and the sweetness of the burning cloves appealing, but right now the juxtaposition turns my stomach.  I take the only logical course of action I can, and do my best to hold my breath until she finishes smoking.

I notice the waitress scurry towards the restaurant's entrance. Stealthy though she is, from my vantage point, I quite obviously see her lock the front door.  Something about covertly trapping fifty people in a restaurant strikes me as an odd thing to do, so I decide to question her the next time she comes by for a warm-up.  "Oh, well, our cook is drunk," she tells me in very hushed tones, "And so I have to run the grill along with all the crap out here.  But people just kept coming in and coming in, so I locked the door."  I marvel at her ludicrous train of thought.  It has a logic that one will only witness in the predawn hours, because the situation that brought it about could only occur in the predawn hours.

I share a smile with my friend as the waitress goes to fill another cup at another table.  This universe in which I find myself will soon collapse, only to be reborn with the next fall of the sun.  Being an amateur, I exist in both worlds, bringing a little of each across the gulf.  I take a little of the day's sanity into the night, and a little of the night's insanity into the day.