Lollipop Training

Isn’t a sleepless night a tedious thing to endure.

There are exceptions, of course.

Public Service Announcement: sleepless nights are lonely time warps that nudge you into solitary isolation and sometimes even despair. But most of us have been there, and daytime is just around the corner, full of its own tricks to surprise you into a life that contains other people.

Truth be told, most of us have had a long night we didn’t hate.

A night well past the time it was meant to finish, just you and someone else, voices in the dark.

Hilarious sleep-overs at friends’ houses, pinky-promises nobody will sleep, humiliating unconsciousness well before midnight.

A night of dancing or of triumph, time forgotten.

Limping clumps of revellers stumbling into the morning after, waiting for the bus with the fresh-faced commuters, sore feet from dancing, wearing someone else’s jumper, pulling down the sleeves live you’ve seen them doing a hundred times. Feeling a little bit like them.

A late night by an orange fire, mesmerised by flames, wondering what’s next. Imagining, maybe, or not thinking at all, the trance of the flames enough to occupy absolutely all of you.

Even a panicked all-nighter with a collaborator as hell-bent as you are can light up something in both of you. The deadline steadfast. You with something to prove.

Awful hospital visits, no stay with me, all the waiting and the worry and the vending machines and hope, can contain moments of beauty. I remember looking out at a pink sky from a hospital room, watching as a storm came in - wonderful and theatrical and simple and the least important thing in my world right in that moment, but I’ll never forget it, banal conversation fading in and out across shifts and automatic doors and sneaker squeaks on floor.

There’s something about the after-match-euphoria of a dramatic emergency too, like the time a water pipe exploded with a bang and gushed through a country motel, spilling three families out into the orange light of the carpark, adults with arms crossed, kids behind legs, joke after lame joke huffing out in dragon-breath speech bubbles while we waited, until someone with the correct tool came and slammed the correct mallet into the correct section of hosing and an all-you-can-eat-way-too-early breakfast was on the house.

But those might be the only exceptions. The more banal sleepless nights are worth nothing at all.

Cruel jokes, those ones, crashing like a wave into the sharp rock of an Important Tomorrow.

A solitary, depressing time-warp of wakefulness. Lists materialise. Horrors become apparent. It’s too hot. It’s too cold. What’s that noise. Why itchy?

But alongside the strange magic of nighttime, there’s the electrifying rejuvenation of the brand new day. You’ll be able to do it, the Important Tomorrow. You’ll cruise through, somehow, and sleep the sleep of the just the following night.

I had no sleep to speak of last night. I tried all the tricks. I ate something. I drank something. I breathed and listened to someone telling me to breath in an app that’s called something like Breathe. But it wasn’t working. I knew today would be a nightmare. I knew I’d mess it all up and feel miserable doing it.

But then I had to get up with the alarm and so I did. I started the day, as planned, in the company of someone else in my family who also hadn’t slept.

We weren’t speaking. Not because we didn’t like each other but because the torture of the previous night made our tongues heavy and our ears clothy and our minds slow. Noises were louder. Lights brighter. And then we went to cross the road. And the usual lollipop person wasn’t at the local school crossing. This surprised us both. But when we realised what was happening we were surprised anew. There was a new lollipop person who was training three other lollipop people. How delightful and surprising! We had entered a scenario.

This was all it took. This was the solution. The disastrous night behind us, we crossed the street with our FOUR lollipop people. There were other pedestrians coming in the opposite direction. They were also part of the scenario. We were in a scenario together! The delight!

Public Service Announcement: the trick of a day is each other. The trick of the night is close and dark. The beautiful thing is, they’re dance partners. You’re never in one without the promise of another. It almost feels deliberate.

This was printed in Ed 748 of The Big Issue. Please support your local vendor.