AARON BURCH lives in Seattle and is the editor of Hobart. He likes to tell people what he does and doesn't like, whether or not they care. He stays awake at night checking his e-mail.

                                                                  sleep


one.

My wife doesn’t like to sleep with me. I don’t mean sex—we both like that just fine. I mean the physical sharing of the bed at night. And in all fairness, she likes that as well. I guess maybe it would be best said that I don’t like to sleep with my wife, but that isn’t the whole story either. In college, my first real, serious girlfriend broke up with me. I went through the whole breakup depression—didn’t go to work, missed a bunch of classes, barely slept, but barely got out of bed, didn’t eat. Months later, I could only sleep cradling a pillow. Spooning with it, I guess. Now, all these years later, I still can’t sleep without it. At first my wife thought it was cute—like the guy that can’t fall asleep with some sort of white noise. Having the TV on, or the radio, or leaving the window open so he can hear the freeway outside. Yeah, I have known all those guys, I told her. She thought she would be able to wean me off it. That her allure and feminine wile would be able to win me over was how she put it. But still, every night, we make love, cuddle some, and then I roll over, my back to her, and grab for my pillow. The same pillow I have been snuggling with since college.


two.

I tried to read The Dharma Bums all through college. Never did make it. Actually, I only tried to read it my first year. As a freshman, I took a basic lit class where we were assigned to read it, and then give an oral report in front of the class. I tried to read it every night for over a week, but never picked it up until I was in bed. I wouldn’t say the book itself put me to sleep so much as the act of reading it. The rhythm of pages turned, eyes scanning, back and forth—I never got more than a couple pages read before I started to drift off. By the time I had to present it to the class, I still hadn’t progressed more than twenty pages, having read those same pages numerous times but still not knowing what had happened. Luckily, there were others ahead of me, so I threw together the little I knew of Kerouac with an amalgamation of what the other students had said and slid by. The rest of the quarter I continued trying to read it—the book itself intrigued me, and I loved On The Road like any good college student should—and the rest of the quarter it continued to put me to sleep. A couple years later, it had become a placebo for sleep and by graduation I was reading the same two pages every night then setting it aside to roll over and grab my pillow, tucking it in close.

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© 2003 Aaron Burch