An Insomniac’s Guide to a Good Night’s Sleep
1. Welcome to Snooze™. I am Ura, your trusted sleep guide. For this session, I will ferry you to a warm place where sleep awaits you. Though your bones are tired and your body weary, they are worthy of rest. You are worthy of sleep. Are the lights turned off? Now is the time to draw the curtains and bar the noise from the world outside. Have you put yourself in a comfortable position? Are you wearing loose clothing? Now breathe in and out, notice the rise and fall of your chest as you draw deep from the diaphragm. This is the time to forget the voice of your boss, the unsubtle warning he issued today about your constant insubordination. You didn’t mean to be rude, you only asked, Why do I have to debit the accounts of deceased customers and transfer the funds to the bank’s coffers? Why don’t we do the right thing and wait for their next of kin to claim their dividends?
This is the time to forget how your boss looked you up and down as if three nuts had come loose in your head. You, a junior staff, talking back to a branch manager, questioning his judgement? You walked away before he brought an end to his diatribe. At your desk, a warning letter arrived: QUERY ON INSUBORDINATION. You tore it into shreds and all your colleagues, like the sheep they are, avoided you because they didn’t understand why you were suddenly an activist for the dead. They didn’t get your angst, the same angst you felt when Mummy pinched and struggled to send her two children to Holy Ghost Commercial College on a lean salary after Daddy died. How she suffered, not knowing that her husband, miser that he was, had squirreled money away in a bank and buried the chequebook under the GeePee tank. The pain sits fresh in your heart because all that scrounging Mummy did from pompous relatives was unnecessary. The money was discovered ten years after his demise, but the bank where Daddy hid the money was no longer in existence, it had merged with other banks, and no one could recognise a chequebook eaten by worms.
2. Now think of a void. A void. A void. Avoid thinking of the space beside you, the space in your bed. Breathe in the smell of her night cream that still lives on the pillow no matter how much you launder the satin cases. Breathe in her smell that haunts every crevice of this room. Was it not last week you called the painters to lay fresh coats of colour on the wall? You believed the chemicals could smother the loud, carnal memories made in this room. If Mummy was still alive, you would have called her right now and said, Mummy, X and I broke up. And Mummy would have said, Nnam, is that why your voice is low? Don’t worry jor, there will be another love. You would ask your mother to pray for you to sleep. Her prayers worked faster than original Nytol. Just a few words over the phone and you’d be knocked out in minutes.
These are the disadvantages of being the last born. Two years after her death, you continue to pine for your mother, wishing you were that little boy again, aged seven and burning up with fever as she rocked you on her knees when sleep refused to come. Mummy would sing in your ears, her breath redolent with ofe akwu and maternal anxiety, and Daddy would sit on the bed scratching his thighs and thinking, Did I get married for this, for a little rascal to take my place in my wife’s bosom? Daddy would roll to the other end of the bed, slapping but missing the mosquitoes that perched on his thighs and arms. Soon his snores would fill the room and in them you heard him begrudging your mother, grieving his abandonment. Though you were young and sick, you felt guilty for taking your mother away from your father, for denying him his right to sound sleep.
3. Let go of every thought—thoughts of pain, shame, anxiety. Let go of the memories that inspire longing. They crawl out of hiding come nightfall, especially the longing. Now that you are awake, you should find X on Instagram. The last time you checked, you noticed she had unfollowed you and made her account private. Now is not the hour to remember how she ended things abruptly, meaning a phone call at exactly 2am, waking you when you were slowly drifting only to deliver her break-up address that couldn’t wait for morning. When the call ended, you deleted the emails, one year’s worth of text messages, cleared the gallery of pictures, the jointly-curated Spotify playlist because you would never listen to Toulouse again, never hear his mournful voice and not think of your lover’s off-key humming.
But at dinner some days ago in a friend’s house, Toulouse’s cover of “I Will Follow You” played, and you were surprised. There are some songs, some artistes, you believe only you and your lover know intimately. When you asked your friend what memory he attached to the song, he shrugged and said he heard it on Instagram and simply added it to his “Chill playlist.” You were jealous, even hurt, that someone else had not only discovered this song but also somewhat trivialized it. You have decided to stop sharing your playlist with anyone, you’ve made a firm resolution to abstain from introducing people to music that moves your heart. That privilege ended with X. With her, you were at your most free. You were not ashamed to put your best songs on repeat, and she nodded raptly whenever you paused to analyse the lyrics. Now is the time to remember your collective surprise when you and X discovered Maxwell wasn’t the original singer of “Woman’s Work.” Both of you felt tricked because his version seemed like a stencil, a template for all other covers. And now you realize you may never share that wonder with someone else. There may never be another who randomly unearthed the strange, forgotten songs of your childhood—how she found them hidden away in some far corners of the internet, you would never know—those songs your mother played on quiet Sunday evenings as she tinkered away in her airtight kitchen, humming along. And every night, these shared pockets of memories, this shared love for peculiar music, keep you from sleep.
4. Now let us transform all the maddening thoughts holding you from sleep into squeaky balls of different colours. Hold them in your hands and throw them out through the window of your mind. Open the windows slowly and cast the balls into a field. Green for anxiety. Blue for sadness. Red for anger. Delete all negative emotions. Delete all worries. Maybe it is time to delete this silly, overhyped app. There are easier ways to fall asleep. Count to 100 backwards, read the Bible, listen to Beethoven, etc. It’s been three nights since you installed Snooze™, yet sleep hasn’t found you. It runs its boring soliloquy for only thirty minutes and then demands you pay for an extended version if you want more time. “Transform all the maddening thoughts into squeaky balls?” Do you look like a child? Is insomnia a joke to this Ura? And what exactly is wrong with negative emotions? What is wrong with your willful refusal to stop mourning? Yes, it was a label-less affair, an unchristened love that fleeted like a bird that never quite perched—still it deserves its own grief. That night after she called, you made plans to send her things back as she had requested. But a week later, at your desk, while you were correcting another debit error that the crooked bank manager had authorised, you saw her WhatsApp status and the pain hit you like a palm across the cheek: She and that other guy were expecting. A baby. Your first reaction was to unknot your tie so you could see better, breathe better. Expecting? How? You knew what X was doing, sending the baby to the highest bidder, to the “father” who had the financial muscle to do the heavy lifting. After all, no sharp babe wants to have a child with a contract staff, a lowly banker whose career stood at the ledge of currency devaluation.
You shut down the computer, ready to leave, but the intercom rang—your boss. Another sketchy cheque needed to be cleared. He was yet again syphoning from a dormant account. You were tempted to put up a fight, but this time you let it slide. That didn’t stop him from calling you sluggish, but he was the least of your worries. You took a bus to her place after the last customer left. You sat on the edge of the weathered seat, willing the traffic to ease up, ignoring the Gala and mineral hawkers as they shoved their wares in your face. Your hands shook, so you practised your breathing before knocking on her door. You shouldn’t have gone to her place, but what were you to do? Move around the world with the knowledge that you had a child somewhere who would be denied their right to the truth? Become another negligent father, just like yours, who preferred his comfort to his children’s welfare? You berated yourself even as you lifted your hands to knock again: This is what you get when you love someone who makes it clear you are not their number one. But you stayed and settled into that affair, hoping you’d love her into changing her mind. What happens next after settling is the negotiation, the trickery, the prayers to God, to make your lover’s tide flow toward you and you alone. But God doesn’t work like that, you soon realized. He respects choices. There are people like you who have coconut heads, slow students who take a longer time to arrive at the sums of love. She made it clear that this house had no room to spare. Did you listen? No. You held to the other side of the conjunction when she added, But I could save you a room in my cluttered basement. You agreed, even though all your life you have always wanted to walk in through the front door of a love that is solely yours. You have always dreamt of saying, It’s my house and I live here. You knew you should have walked away when she said there was no room for you, but you said you’d take the basement, you’d take whatever space she offered.
5. Oh, you’re back? Your other sleep methods failed you? What a pity. You are fortunate to have returned before twenty days while I can still restore the accounts of disgruntled users. Shall we try again? Sleep is a tough task for some of us, but I will patiently guide you to it. But first, you must leave me a rating before we proceed. Thank you. Now imagine what it is to be calm. You are by a stream, and you hear waters washing the pebbles clean, and nature is rich with its vegetative smell. Hear the sizzle of creeks passing through the rocks and the faint twittering of birds. Now let your body relax at the picture of your mother taking you to the stream for the first time in the village, see her guiding your feet as you wade into the cold, and she says to you, Nnam, don’t be afraid, I am holding your hand. You bend to pick the tadpoles but chicken out and clutch Mummy’s skirt instead. This is the dream that returns to you night after night when sleep finally slips in. At other times, the image your mind conjures is her still face as she lay in state at the altar, powdered up so ghastly that she would have complained if she saw herself. She would have hissed at your pompous relatives trudging past to pay their last respects all the while pretending they were not eyeing that little patch of land, her only possession that was now your inheritance since your sister is married and refuses to bother herself with village people’s politics. You were seeing her for the first time in three years, your sister, and with her continued absence and your calls which she never returned, she has made it clear she has moved on from your family and its misery and, invariably, from you. After the funeral, she dabbed her eyes with a white handkerchief, returned her sunglasses to her face, and drove away, never looking back. When they found you alone, your pompous relatives told you the land was no longer yours and you should be grateful they even offered to bury your mother in a choice site, a corner facing the stream. You blame your father, miser that he was, for putting only the names of his brothers in his will, for hiding a chequebook under an old tank, for impoverishing his son, his daughter, his widow, for making you go through life with a psychological limp such that the only inheritance you have is a deep sense of scarcity that makes you beg for the love of a woman who warned you she was not a bird in hand.
6. I am trying my best to put you to sleep but you must let me help you. Ninety percent of my users fall asleep by the twenty-fifth minute, but this is your fifth replay for tonight. Are you sure you wouldn’t consider the premium version? The day is almost breaking and the edges of your eyes hurt from all that rubbing. How nice it is that you’re hovering and considering the premium version. Anyway, think of stillness, the good kind. The tranquillity of a child asleep. Think of those days Mummy cradled you to sleep when you cried and asked about your father who, in your child’s mind, suddenly disappeared, how his absence left the memory of an exaggerated version of him, a towering figure, his voice the pulse of your household. Remember the stillness of those nights when Mummy, thinking you had fallen asleep, would let loose her muffled sobs, her shoulders heaving under the weight of her recent widowhood. Do not think of the stillness that foretells doom, not the stillness of a child at mischief. Think of security, as sure as your back is on your bed, as sure as the dark is to the night, think of lovers who want to stay, who vow to stay. Think of lovers who say, I’d never leave you nor forsake you. Not X, not the one who left, not the one who said, My needs are too large, my needs are more than your hands can supply. Think of how you begged, Please don’t deceive a man who isn’t the real father of your child. You asked her, What does he have that I don’t have? Just money? Ordinary money? She said to you, First of all, this baby isn’t yours, and you better get the fuck out of my house before I call MOPOL to scatter all the teeth in your mouth. Undeterred, you knelt and held her hands. You stated what you offered her: care. Joy. A shared playlist. This other man may have money, but her wit will dry up like a drought-stricken lake in his presence. This man may be rich, but he is not one to stir her laughter. You didn’t tell her why you wanted her back. You didn’t tell her you slept better when she lay next to you. You didn’t tell her you never dreamt of your mother when the warmth of her calf rested against yours, that she was the antidote to your restive state. Perhaps you should have confessed, but how dare you reveal what you truly feared: That all your life, you would search for someone whose body next to yours would bring you sleep.
Ucheoma Onwutuebe (@ucheomar) is a Nigerian writer and an MFA student at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She is the recipient of the 2022 Waasnode Fiction Prize and has received residencies from Yaddo, Art Omi, and the Anderson Center. Her works have appeared and are forthcoming in A Public Space, Catapult, Prairie Schooner, Off Assignment, Bellevue Literary Review, and elsewhere.