Solace in the Silence: Grief After Hours

Grief after hours. I wait for the night, when everyone around me is asleep and all is quiet. I've feared that time since I lost my sister a year ago; no distractions from my thoughts and sadness. A period where the loss felt the most real as I sat alone in the dark with only my mind. As of the past few weeks, however, it's become the time I most look forward to. My time. A part of my day where I can put down everything and just be. I usually sit and watch a movie or an episode of a series on Netflix. I watch it until my eyelids are heavy and I can't stay awake any longer.

Sleep has never come easy for me; my mind is always going. Even as a child, I struggled so deeply with bedtime; with the idea that I magically had to make myself tired because of numbers on a clock. I understand the idea behind it, but it was always a frustrating and dreaded time of the day for me. I'd lie there awake, going over every and anything, for hours, in my head. None of that has changed, and the only way I'm able to sleep is if I exhaust myself mentally and/or find something that helps me slow my thoughts down enough to relax and get tired.

Somehow, I've found solace in the stillness that comes when my mind is the only conscious one in my home. Maybe it just feels like everything stops. The phone stops dinging with emails, phone calls, messages, social media.....maybe it's being disconnected from the constant overstimulation, from the reminders of how much I miss our nightly Facebook messages and video calls. Maybe it's not having to go about my day like everything is normal, when deep down, nothing about it is normal or will ever feel normal again. Or maybe it's all of those things and how much they drain me, so when night comes, I'm so desperate for a reprieve from my thoughts, from my grief.....and I need sleep more now than I ever have before, so I can wake up with the motivation needed to force myself out of bed and face another day of this still-so-new to me reality of life....without her.