The Lamp Eternal

When I was a kid I read every volume of Garfield comic strips I could get my hands on. One strip in particular that sticks in my mind had a sequence of Garfield standing by a light switch, flipping it off, zooming into his cat bed while the room was still lit, and in the final panel (a dark one) thinking to the audience, "Faster than the speed of dark."

It's a silly thing to remember, especially because I can't relate to the experience. In this phase of life my room (while I am present to experience it) is rarely a dark place. Even if only my body is present, the light is still on. On many occasions my mom has said to me, "And you were still up when I got up around seven" and I reply, "No, I fell asleep with the light on."

Comfort is why the light is on. Or maybe fear. At the surface, I can point to practicality: I fall asleep with my lamp still burning because I read myself to sleep and don't wake up until morning.

Bedtime reading is another thing that has stuck around since childhood. First the years of being read to by my mom, then the years when we would read a book together before I went to sleep, then the years when I would sneak my book into the bathroom and devour chapter after chapter despite the discomfort of sitting on the edge of the bathtub.

But now as I think about it, I don't remember this sort of nocturnal reading taking place very much in the last three years. I have a book light, sure, for nights of insomnia or an especially exciting story. Those times are the exception. Normally bed time means snuggles, curling up with my arms around my husband, or pressing my back against his and enjoying the slow rhythm of his breathing until I drift to sleep.

Leaving the light these days lets me stay with the comfort of an author until my brain can't string words together anymore. Books keep me engaged with thoughts outside my own head, escaping my vast, underoccupied bed to courtrooms and communes, restaurants and raceways, manor homes and motorhomes. It doesn't matter where I go or what I'm reading; "not present" is all I care about.

Leaving the light on helps me escape my own introspection. Alone in the dark, I often have to spend several minutes aware of thoughts that race or lurk around my mind. When I loosen the tethers of planning this and puzzling that, my consciousness wanders and often falls into the abyss, the unavoidable chasm. Even though I've been staying on its precipice for about 150 days, I'm still vulnerable to its gravity. I'm afraid of that abyss and the raw hurt that never really goes away when my thoughts linger on what's missing from my life, my bed. I prefer to move straight from fiction to dream.

And so the bulb burns.

Occasionally, like tonight, I'm too exhausted to find any of my books suitably numbing. Sometimes I tell myself I'm not only too tired to read, not only too tired to move across the room to flip the switch by the door, but also too tired to stretch the two feet to snap my lamp off at the neck.

But tonight, while fussing around, arranging blankets and pillows and limbs into a comfortable sleeping position, I'll find myself close enough to the light. Despite my headache, I'll look up under the shade at the naked bulb as my fingers find the knob to cut the stream of electricity. It will take two clicks, then I will be treated to my own miniature, captive sunset. The filament will glow for an extra moment, reminding me that lightbulbs are a source of heat as well as light.

And finally, remembering the time Reagan and I burned a hole in a fabric napkin by draping it over my desk lamp in order to cast the room in San Marcos in a moody, reddish glow... I'll brave the darkness.