Can’t sleep

It’s 12:36 AM, it’s hot and muggy, the air is thick and dense, a storm is brewing, and I can’t sleep. I need to be awake in 7 hours and I have a long and stressful day ahead, full of doctors and tests. Every minute that passes feels like 10.
The bed feels hard, the sheets like sandpaper. The pillows are flat and lumpy. I can feel every bump and undulation in the mattresses, each spring. This bed that when I first lay down felt like floating on a cloud, now feels like concrete.
It’s 12:42. That’s 6 minutes less to sleep. Counting sheep doesn’t work. I have an overactive imagination and can’t help conjuring up back stories. One escaped from a farm, the farmer is in hot pursuit. The wooly wanderer manages to out run its owner and bleats for friends to join her in this great escape. I try and concentrate on watching ‘Friends’. Hoping it will help. I know it so well by now it’s easy to tune out. I hate the silence even when sleeping, so instead I tend to let Monica Geller’s not so dulcet shrieks soothe me into dream land. Tonight this just isn’t working.
The window is open but it still feels stuffy, the air feels stale and static. Everywhere itches (serves me right for forgetting my hayfever tablets.) It feels like ants are crawling under my skin. I am now made up of bones, blood and insects. No amount of scratching will help. My epidermis is infested. One more reason to hate summer, plants and trees seem to have a vendetta against me. I don’t know why, I recycle every bit of paper I can, and we convert food waste into compost. Surely I’m an ally to all things soil related. Yet they make it their mission to leave me red, puffy and without the top few layers of skin.
12:58. Joey is in London, he decides the best way of orienteering the new surroundings is to step into the map. I like his thinking. I only wish it worked, my sense of direction is often appalling. Not even Google maps with verbal directions can save me from my terrible grasp of geography.
1:03. If it wasn’t the heat stopping my sleep, it’s the pain. It’s a vicious cycle. It’s too hot for me to get comfortable. The longer I’m awake the more pain and discomfort I’m in. The pain causes me to become more alert, which makes me more aware of the heat. And it goes on and on and on and on. I pine for the winter again. I want to fall and faceplant in to the crunchy, cold snow. Or I want to be snuggled up in quilts and fluffy pajamas, cosy and comfortable. Instead I’m trying to stay cool in a t-shirt and cropped PJ bottoms…it’s not working.
1:09. Why do all American programs portray all British people as posh, refined and often stuck-up. The ‘British’ accent that Americans refer to only covers a very small area. I don’t know anyone that speaks like Hugh Laurie when talking to Rachel on the plane. Ah the problems and conundrums your brain conjures up when it refuses to let you sleep.
1:13. My eyes are getting heavy. I can feel my breathing becoming deeper and more even. Phone is going away now. Can’t let this often fleeting fatigue slip away…. So night night for now.
4:06. I’m back up. Monica and Chandler are trying to hide their post London relationship. I wonder if tossing and turning in bed counts as exercise. If it does I should be a twig by now. 3 hours to go before the alarm.
7:10. I’m up. I feel I need to sew my eyelids to my eyebrows just to stay awake. The bed which a few hours earlier was painful and uncomfortable looks inviting and cosy. It feels like it belongs in a luxury hotel. I have to try and override all urges to close my eyes, just for a few minutes. I know if I give in I won’t ever get up.
7:30. I get up and get dressed, but everything is more difficult. My mind is awake (just about) but my body is fast asleep. I feel like a rag doll flopping and stumbling all over the place. Fingers crossed for a good night tonight. Wishful thinking I know.