Insomnia (journal topic)

For the past two nights, I’ve felt as if I have insomnia & I’m sure this will last until July 3rd when my husband gets home. With Phillip gone, I can’t fall to sleep. I hear every noise in the house. Last night, I even waiting until I went to bed to turn on the washer and dryer so that the sounds from the laundry room right next to our bedroom would drown out whatever other noises might be sounding off in the night.
Even over buttons flopping around inside the dryer I heard “tap tap tap tap tap…” It sounded like someone tapping on the window to our back door. No one ever uses the back door. I start to rationalize the sound… it must be the tree… sometimes when the limbs get too long, they tap against the top of the house… then I remember we just cut the limbs before Phillip left. So I get out of bed at 11:30 and sneak around my own house. The noise stops when I enter the kitchen and flip on the light. This made me even more paranoid… then I see Mojo, our leopard gecko in the corner of his tank, front leg frozen in what I know was mid-dig. He has dug past his sand into the rock substrate. That tap tap tap was the little pebbles hitting the sides of his glass tank. Relieved I return back to bed.
I fall to sleep, but wake up about 2 hours later. I hear the wind outside blowing the tree and a cat screeching. I just bet it’s the neighbor’s cat stuck up in my tree again. Then I hear crickets and frogs outside and I think I can go back to sleep until I hear sound like footsteps. These are too loud to me Mojo. I called Phillip. At 1:30 here, it was only 10:30 at his brother’s house. He tells me to calm down and stop worrying and that if it made me feel any better, there was always the gun in his bedside table and the metal baseball bat I’ve kept under every one of my beds since my freshman year of college.
I try to go back to sleep, but I keep hearing that thud like heavy footprints on our porch… Thud… Thud…. Thud… like someone is pacing back and forth right outside my front door. This time, I’m paranoid I tell myself. I think about grabbing the bat and taking it with me, I don’t know how to put the clip in the gun & my luck I’d probably injure myself…. but I realize I’m only being silly. Still, to make myself feel better I crawl out of bed and tip toe through the hallway into the kitchen. I flip on the light, Mojo is spread out on his log now wide eyed and looking right at me. Well, he wasn’t making any noises…. Even with the light on, I notice the Thuds haven’t stopped. Once I get to the front door, I realize those sounds aren’t coming from the porch.. They’re coming from the front room. It must be Shellden (my 6-year-old red-eared slider). Sure enough, when I reach the guest bedroom at the front of the house, there she is, banging her shell on the side of the tank where I feed her. Apparently, she was still hungry after finishing off the freeze dried shrimp I gave her just before bed. This is her signal for feeding time…. I drop in some pellets which she looks at distastefully, but I already fed her the last of the shrimp, so this will have to do.
I go back to bed, but I can’t fall to sleep. I keep hearing the sounds. I swear our pets were plotting against me last night…I’m surprised the fish weren’t in on it somehow… It’s tough sleeping in that king size bed alone. I’m so used to falling to sleep beside Phillip that can’t sleep without him.
Somewhere around 2:15, I decided to try some relaxing sounds I burned to a CD not too long ago. I’m sorry, but the sound of running water is not relaxing. All “Babbling Brook & Bach” did for me was make me get out of bed again. I’m not sure what time it was when I finally nodded off again last night, but I know I overslept this morning. It took everything I had in me to get out of that bed and make it here on time. This afternoon, I’m going to make a pit stop at the Walgreens on my way home. Tonight, I’m going to resolve to some Tylenol PM.