Sleeping Habits

I used to tell people that I missed the liveliness of my home, how I could walk upstairs at any point of the day, even in the silent night, to find someone still awake. When all four of my siblings lived here, the air always seemed to be alive. My older sister Emily would be on the computer in the living room at four in the morning, racing to type up an assignment that was due at seven: “I’m almost done.” My older brother Jose would hold the couch down for hours into the night (my dad joked that his couches would float if it weren’t for us) as he played video games: “One more quest.” My little sister Wendy and I even made a tradition out of 3 AM Mac-and-Cheese in which she’d knock and poke her head into my room: “Hey, you still up? You hungry?” The youngest, Juan, seemed to sleep but was secretly holed up in his room as he did who-knows-what. I’d ask him in the morning as he tumbled into the living room, still half asleep: “What was it this time? Anime? Video Games? Just couldn’t sleep?” We played a game called “Who stayed up the latest,” just another of the many things we competed on. It got harder as we got older, and the times seemed to go from the middle of the night to early and even late morning. Our lacking schedules created a comforting idea; when I was so sucked into a book that I wouldn’t care what time it was, I knew that someone else was still up. Together, we transformed what most consider lonely and quiet times of the night into something more intimate as, no matter how quietly, the house still seemed to breathe. When I left, the number of occupants dropped to four, and the bedtime moved up to ten. When I visited, I discovered that an unnatural silence had settled into the space I most enjoyed. Unnerved, I began to miss our quaint nightlife.

But now, I take it all back.

It has been six years since we’ve all been here. While I thought a reunion was much further in the future, apparently a global pandemic is enough to bring everyone home, and it all snapped back like a rubber band. Emily, still procrastinating on her homework, writes essays on legal topics, sometimes about murderers, and asks, “Can you read this?” Her almost one-year-old daughter Clara fits in perfectly, playing with her toys and running up and down the stairs till two in the morning, and her husband Yohel gets along on his phone just as well. Jose, still playing the same video game, turns the television up loud and lets the same, repetitious character reactions echo through the house: “You never should’ve come here.” Wendy, whose room is the only one to share a wall with mine, has picked up online gaming and shouts, yells, and screams at her screen at the most ungodly times of night. Juan has the schedule I can’t seem to figure out. Sometimes, showered and dressed, he’ll be wide awake on his Chromebook at eight in the morning, but other times, we won’t see him till he peels himself off his bed at five in the evening. Every night here is a dying party where the few obnoxious stragglers left refuse to leave. Our game resumed like it never stopped, but I no longer want to play. I learned a lot while I was at college, and one of the things I picked up was a decent sleeping habit. Now, I am back in an environment where no one sleeps, and daily naps are the standard. When I try to go to bed, I find myself lying awake, listening to the stairs groan and the pipes hiss as they announce movement. When I do stay up, often because nothing around me seems to indicate that it’s bedtime, I walk Clara in circles around my undead house. I enjoy my family and their jokes, like how I came home today to find a banana duck taped to my bedroom door (I despise bananas), but I wish that I could just get a nice, undisturbed night of sleep. Is that too hard to ask for?