A Perfectly Ordinary Tuesday Morn

He fussed with his blog until little more than an hour remained before dawn. Some things were beyond his control, but he would exhaust all possibilities before conceding defeat. After hours of sitting in the darkness and tinkering at the keyboard, he achieved an equilibrium between what he wanted and what the gods of creativity would allow, and he put his computer to sleep and went to his bedroom. He picked up a book and began reading some pages of the novel that was his current literary interest: Love in the Time of Cholera, written by Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez. The novel had won a Nobel Prize in Literature, though he hadn't known that (perhaps he had forgotten) when the book arrived in the mail, sent by a friend in Costa Rica. 

He turned out the light and lay back in bed and rolled over on his left side. His right side hurt from some unremembered accident incurred while sleep-walking, and he suspected a fractured rib, inasmuch as it had pained him for several months now. He was so accustomed to sleeping on his left side that his left shoulder joint was now hurting him, as if the ligaments were protesting the weight placed upon them for too many hours every night.  After a few minutes he knew he was deluding himself by thinking he could enjoy two or three hours of sleep before dawn. He knew it was not to be.

There was a time when he would anesthetize himself with vodka before going to bed, and it would put him to sleep—for a while. But then the sleep-walking started, and he would get up in the morning and find large bruises and sometimes lacerations on his body, and blood on his t-shirt and on the bed sheet. At first the blood puzzled him, but when he stepped into the shower and felt the cuts on his body, he knew that it was time to relinquish his nighttime soporific. He never remembered how the cuts and bruises came to be on his body. The part of his brain that could have communicated the event was asleep when it happened, and the part of his brain that possibly did remember the event was mute. Sometimes he felt like one of those unfortunate persons who had to have their corpus callosum severed: truly, a split-personality. He would go to bed sleepy with booze, only to awaken in the morning light, battered in a bedroom where a fight had apparently taken place during the night, with cardboard boxes bashed and broken, a table lamp placed on top of his cell phone on the dresser, a trashcan overturned, his sheet and blanket on the floor. Perhaps he had battled his own demons during the night.

Dawn was almost an hour away when he walked to the dark living room and awakened his computer. Within seconds he was illuminated by the blue-tinged white light of the flat-screen monitor. The light was paradoxically somewhat dim and yet harsh, he noted. He typed in the address of his blog and then summoned the editor. His mouse hovered over the button that was labeled "New Post" and he clicked it. He began writing about a man who couldn't sleep and he wondered how, one day, the story would end.