3am: Wake. Or, make the decision to wake. I’ve been dozing at best. Kept on the surface of sleep by my own snores, the buzzing dryness of my throat. Baby Nayirr is next to me, my tiny angel, having just fed. His sleep is also unsettled. I decide I am the reason for it and leave the bed.Find my desk in the dark, download the latest zip file the developer sent me for this site. We’ve had some trouble trying to make the header work for desktop and mobile. It's still shit.
330: Read about the massacre in Colorado Springs queer nightclub. “At least 5 dead” the headlines say. The word used is "shooting". It’s always a shooting. But it is a massacre. The continual mass occurrence of massacres is not only tolerable in America, it is defended ad nauseam. And who amongst us is not nauseated? Not sick? We are reeling within more than one pandemic, more than one grief.
4am: In the spare room. So tired my eyes are desert pits. Writing this in my Notes app. Throat still sore. Thinking now of the other night Hannah shook me awake: “You’re not breathing”, “I don’t care” I said and shook her off. She looked shocked and I carried her hurt into the dark. Exhaustion makes a brute animal of me; we talked about it later and I told her about the bodgy take-home test for sleep apnea I did years ago. It said I don’t have it, and I know I do, that I should go to one of the overnight clinics and get diagnosed properly.
I don't because it will cost money. Three decades on this rock and I avoided doctors like the plague, swallowed my pains, and it's only these past three years that I deluded myself into thinking I had enough capital to be healthy. I have gathered unto myself a half dozen diagnoses in this time and I'm broke again. 430: Can hear Nayirr making his sleepy noises in the other room. Still think I’m to blame. Or if not to blame exactly then at least that it’s a “problem”. I make problems of everything, and problems need to be resolved, they require something of me. Except maybe it’s not a problem. Maybe he’s just making noises, the thick murmur of the dreaming.
6am: Nayirr's awake and ready for his morning play. I take him out to his play-mat in the lounge room. He starts energetically tugging on the dangling toys, shoving whatever he can reach into his mouth. He's 6 months old and the centre of my universe. I'm so tired, but I'm smiling, and in me is a joy and a love so profound it startles my spirit every day. I crawl over to him and kiss his toes, his tiny gorgeous feet.
7am: I'm eating zaatar manoush and drinking a can of V. I like the idea of taking notes like these, the idea of a diary, of radical transparency into the my life at this moment where everything is blurring at warp speed... and at the same time, I am deeply wary. Because transparency by another name is vulnerability, and I have had what I've chosen to share with the world used too often as a weapon against me. What use is individual transparency in an opaque system where the most privileged are shrouded and protected no matter the violences they enact? Sometimes I think all we are doing is making targets of ourselves. This is true of any kind of love, though, it comes with the risk of harm. I delude myself into thinking love is worth it, and that love can be found in any number of strangers like you.