Insomnia Steve Gergley
For six-hundred days I couldn't sleep, so I passed each night in my
grandfather's armchair in the attic. There I listened to the rain clatter
against the gambrel roof of the house. I watched spiny dust motes twirl
and tumble in the moonlight. I sank into the slabs of soft leather and
smelled the muddy musk of my sweat. Months later, on the hottest morning
of the summer, as a glacier towered over the tops of the oaks and slowly
carved a path through the cul-de-sac, I set up a camcorder on a tripod,
pointed it out the window, returned to my grandfather's armchair, and
beckoned my wife to the attic with a text. For the next year we sat
sandwiched on the armchair together, grooming each other like cats, and
watching the glacier through the tiny screen of the camcorder. Our clothes
survived only six months. Our skin fused to the leather after eight. We
invented a new language through touch and encountered staggering frontiers
of bodily intimacy. I didn't sleep. The glacier scratched closer to the
house. The summer seemed to last forever.
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