Finally I have given up on my terrible faux-sleep and gotten out of bed. All night long it rained and snowed and sleeted and sleeted and rained and snowed, and now under lamplight a dense crust glints from the car, the driveway, the fence rails, the tarps weighted with old shingles, the garden hose we used to flush the well. In two weeks I will not be the person shoveling the stoop. Today I still am.

On Friday, my band Doughty Hill will be performing at the Rack on Sugarloaf Mountain in Kingfield, 9-12:30 p.m. I'll get home from that gig at just about the same time I got up this morning. It will be very confusing. But even without that monkey wrench, my sleep cycle is consistently strange. One night I sleep like the hibernating dead. The next night I wake for good at 2 a.m. The next night I dream and dream and dream. The next night I can't get to sleep till 2 a.m. The next night I'm too hot and keeping waking up and drowsing off, waking up and drowsing off. The next night the cat pushes a glass of water into the bed. The next night I sleep like the hibernating dead. Etcetera. You can't exactly call me an insomniac. It's more like being an improv sleeper who's lost control of her sketch.

Maybe, when I live in the city, I will get up in the black hours and look out at the streetlamps and the sea fog and watch headlights track patterns across the walls. Maybe I will listen to the garbage trucks bang before dawn. Maybe it will be comforting to realize that I am not awake alone.