Stagnated or sealed out of the world of the public remedy, then, the next mode for many turns to more. Antidepressants are considered strong options for those with histories of depression, pain, or substance-abuse problems — the lack of sleep therein likely often a byproduct or shared terror floor. Among these medications, trazodone has been around since the 1960s, a second-generation antidepressant, and remains popular for its chemic lack of addictive properties, if still surrounded by endless potential inner destructions — drowsiness, fatigue, headaches, decreased sex drive, dizziness, as well as priapism in 1 in 6,000 men, 1 in 23,000 of whom will require surgery and suffer potential impotence for life. In addition, popular painkillers such as OxyContin. Darvon. Vicodin. Percocet. Percodan, Demerol. Lortab, Norco, Lorcet, though not prescribed in cases of pure sleeplessness, are often used for that end, sometimes, under the roof of self-medication, serving as a doorway unto death. The laundry list of effects and odds in deep relation with medication has for the most part become another feature in the stream of new info we as a community receive.
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For years inside my own mess I’d gone on simply worming, resolved to remain floated in whatever unsleeping space my brain would bring. And yet, as household orders failed, and times stretched longer, the length of night began to grow, becoming just slightly more unbearable and hated in its new reach, night after night, night in night. In general I’d avoided doctors, appearing before them only when there were no other ways around, mainly out of some aversion to the small rooms and the white paper, the waiting behind doors for bodies who make their living negotiating, feeding, feeling, peering into other bodies. In the same way I’d let my wisdom teeth barrel in reckless, creating slow screw sound inside my mouth, which some nights would keep me up or wake me, the same way some people grind their molars through their night hours. This state, known as bruxism, is actually one of the most common forms of non-thought-sound-based insomnia, wherein people will grind their whites together so hard as to cause damage, ruin their smile. In addition to the usual symptoms that accompany sleep disorders, bruxism has been related to aggressive personalities and those with suppressed anger. Because it occurs during sleep, it can be difficult to detect bruxism, outside of waking symptoms such as chewed mouth tissue, teeth cracking, earaches, unusual wear on teeth or gums, headaches, jaw pain, and so on.
My mother gave me my first few Ambien from a prescription she’d gotten for occasional relief. She hesitated placing the small football-shaped powder-blue orbs in another orange container, also labeled with her name, and agreed only to let me have them if I’d hide the bottle in an inner pocket of my large coat. If the police were to catch me, she said, explain that they were hers, that I was bringing them to her, after a vacation. Something. I kissed my mother on the head — she who had gifted me with the brain of no sleep had gifted me again. I took the blue pills home. I carried the bottle near my heart. I felt excited, in the low lurch, to try this chemic door, this X-ing out. I did not know why it had not occurred to me before now to dig this yard up. Inside my bathroom, I shook a pill into my palm. I nudged it with my finger, saw my reflected face. It went down the way a pill does, a tiny bite of nothing. I don’t remember any flavor. I do remember moving there with the pill inside me to sit down on the bed in my bedroom, the thread of expectation snowing in me, waiting for inverted fireworks, some fall. I did not know if I expected some sense of caving, a slowing blackout, or some more immediate snuffing, like a blanket over light. I was nervous, like a waiting parent. I took my clothes off, did not pee. The room waited, with its light. I don’t remember the way the blank came, except that when it did, outside me, I was gone. The doors opened and I went through them, and there I hid. There was no roll. No silent chorus of selves in nothing, saying the same sounds again, again. That night, at least, I fell in.
The particular thing about Ambien is that if you don’t follow its lead, it does a different job. You can’t take Ambien and then walk around the house and wait to get knocked over into zzzzz. The crossover, if not played party to, if not laid down for in want and waiting for the night, might make the waking room itself take on the space of sleep. There are people there who are not there. Somewhat, in another way, like those extended colors and doors of particularly extended periods of insomnia — the dream folds invading the conscious mind regardless, reclaiming the air. For this reason Ambien frequently ends up as a party favor, a recreational detonator, turning the self onto the rooms’ air — taking pills to find the tunnels, the hidden hours, that otherwise you’d only negotiate asleep — the folding of conscious and unconscious, even if often afterward you don’t remember it anymore than you would a dream, unto the self hidden in the self. A state of unwaking fused in waking, removed in the way one might find coming open after long periods of sleeplessness, though in this case invoked through chemicals. This is another self called to the front, rather than drawn up in small collapsing. Then in the morning there I was again. Untroubled, I’d gone somewhere. I felt newly rejuvenated, rested, if just in the name of having nodded off without the fight, a clipping of those flopping hours. Night was shorter now — even if, under just that first time, something about my body felt off center somewhat, slightly not right. This sleep had been fraught upon me, opened by chemistry and not by the elevators of my mind. A little glassy in the waking, copied. But that was fine. Oh, that was fine. Even underneath the slight trace of sleep hangover, I could get up on time and move throughout a day. That next night I took the sleeping pill again.
That next night’s next night I took the sleeping pill again. Here, now, a triad of nights of normal sleep. Waking that third day, it seemed so open. How easy, in repetition. How quick to want so hard. If anything’s the problem with eating sleep out of a doctor’s bottle, it’s that once you’ve realized there’s a way, it can instantly become the only way. On the fourth night, then seeing the pills there, I think I thought, “Three good nights in a row, perhaps now I can roll on inside myself. Save those others for when I need them.” The bottle stayed inside the drawer of my bedside table, almost touching to the bed. Lying down unpilled-up, the room settled around me as it mostly had, again. The dark air waiting. Windows. The rhythm of the breathing. Outside the pill realm, pressed on the pillow, in want, my same old thoughts turned on again, the roll of routine of never silence. Only this time, now, there was another fold into the throes — no longer simply an endless scroll of my own thinking, but now, I should take a sleeping pill. I could hear the bottle right there in the room beside me, asking. Like the sublime objects of my child years, I felt its eyes. The night in this expectation went on even longer, every minute doubled in its doubling, pressing on. Every minute I did not succumb and take the pill was a moment wasted in going on. With an immediate, unnatural door now open, the door was right there, despite my want to stick most hours to the fleshy, silent self-made hall.