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5. The Sun at Night

Soleia 0.4

This isn't easy.  My nerves are frayed.  Funnily enough, I'm actually past the point of laughter...Startling in a way - I didn't think I had that point.  I looked down at you just now and couldn't laugh at how awful this was.  It was just awful - with nothing else that I could take away.

You cry - water running from the Sun.  It's unnatural - the Sun crying and the way that you cry.  You have that higher level.  It stops being crying.  It goes past screaming, past bawling, past wailing, to some other word that I can't think of now.  I can't think of most words now, being as tired as I am.

If I heard the sound you were making and weren't looking at you, I'd think that someone was lowering you very slowly into boiling oil.  That is literally the only thing I could think of someone doing to me that might make me make that sound.  The only thing.  Not having my arm sawed off with a butter knife.  Not being castrated by running my boy parts back and forth over a cheese grater.  Only boiling oil could make me generate that sound and you make the sound from simply being held lightly in my arms at 4:30 am.

Shriek...?  is that the word?

Jesus, my beloved...don't you get tired?!?  How can you keep it up?

I hung my head (along with my hopes), lamely, upon the notion that you'd exhaust yourself based on the laws of physics and biology alone.  That no one your size could continue with this through the entire night - that some law of the energetic capacities and demands of infants meant that their was some upper limit to which you had to observe.  That it simply wasn't possible for someone your size to make that sound on and off for six straight hours.  I see now what I did to myself there.  I underestimated you and it is part of my feeling of failure.  It is part of my despair.  I set myself the hope for relief and respite and now that I see that it won't come, my despair is darker than it otherwise would have been.  I'll learn from that mistake and not underestimate you again.

No, but...it's more than howling...it's worse than howling...

The dark, selfish thoughts tickle at the corners of my frayed nerves.  I wonder about your capacity to recover from a mild blow to the head: your cells are, after all, at their most capable & versatile and very little that happens to you now couldn't be fixed over the course of the next 80 years of your life.  I think the sinister thought and think back to Libet and the 'free won't': the firmware deep capacity for psychological negation of the impulses that travel through all of us.  I thank any God that will listen for my "free won't" because I love you so much but even the greatest love in all the Universe is still only as strong as the mind that does the loving and no one's mind works very well without sleep.  Why do we underestimate that, I wondered all of a sudden?  Sleep allows us to be who we actually are; lack of sleep makes us into zombies - nothing more than impulses, urges, and biology.  With sleep, my Kwynn, you are the entire universe to me and nothing else is a distant second.  Without it, my mind can actually conjur a world in which I dropped you on your head so that I can close my eyes for 15 minutes.  Without sleep, the world gets smaller and smaller until the smallest thing in the world - a person's own tiny little existence, becomes the only thing that one can think of.  Without sleep, a person is capable of anything because a person ceases to be themselves.

This is an important lesson - no one is tougher than the biology.  No one is tougher than sleep deprivation.

My head hurts now and outside the window I can see that the Sun has come up.  Yet I hold the Sun in my arms and the Sun never actually went down.  A paradox...my head hurts even more.  The Sun burned brightly in my arms the whole night and I couldn't afford to close my eyes, lest I drop the Sun, and dropping the Sun was never an option.  I confess with a small degree of shame, I'm bordering on tears.  I was wholly ineffectual and totally at the mercy of you, my beloved daughter - my Sun that shines at Night.  Your mother has awaken, the long night is over, and now my watch is ended...

But I'll learned this hard lesson and go full nocturnal if that's what it takes to get you to sleep.  I'll become a goddamn owl if I have to.  I'll become a bloody vampire.

Love,
Papa

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