When Sleep Evades

There are nights where I have trouble sleeping.

I sit here in this living room.

Comfortable.  Well lit.  So large compared to so many places I have lived in recent memory.  There is no one to distract me, there is no ambient noise unless you count the dish washer running.  The little basement apartment right after the divorce.  The three kids in that strangely shaped room literally paces away from where I was sleeping.  Cramped and low ceilings, but I could just walk in there sit on the couch and watch them sleep in their bunk beds. 

Then another room, large in size but only to house the 20 plus men laying in hard metal cots around me.  All of our personal belongings either in a drawer below our bunk, or in a locker in the hall.  And the things that we couldn't bring into work release with us, in a locker outside the facility.  There is the constant noise of men coming and going, and I just sit and wonder.  Where they are, what they are doing.  Are they happy?  Are they safe? 

I long for their little arms, and their joy filled voices.  I miss them.

Then a move to a big city.  A place where there are jobs, and hope.  And a small room that a woman comes to when she can, and loves me the way I have never been loved.  And sirens and drunken jerks yelling, and the blue light of midnight writing, and sorrow of knowing that they are so far away, but that I can't get them here just yet, that I have to keep working for it, and keep fighting for a toe hold, a single shred of a life that is real and stable.

And here I am.  In this comfortable place.  And I'm trying, I'm trying so hard to get to sleep.  To not wonder, and worry.

And I slip the head headphones on, and I find something that makes me think of them.  Something that makes me know that I will have them here with me someday, if I keep going.  If I keep working.  If I keep...

I just miss them sometimes.  A lot.