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There was a time when night felt more honest than day.
Quieter.
Not empty, not still, but stripped of everything that made people difficult to read. The world lost its edges in the dark, softened into something that didn’t demand anything of you. It didn’t ask you to perform, didn’t ask you to explain. It just… existed.
And if you stayed awake long enough, it would let you exist with it.
I didn’t start out an insomniac.
Not the way people mean it.
I learned it.
Slowly, over years I didn’t think to question, nights stretching longer than they were meant to. I’d wrap myself in blankets and sit just inside my doorway, fighting off sleep as best I could, waiting for the sound of the door opening, keys shifting, footsteps returning something to the house that felt missing without them.
Most nights, I lost.
Sleep would take me first, and morning would come with no memory of when she had gotten home, only the faint sense that she had. That was enough.
Until it wasn’t.
Eventually, I stopped trying to win.
Instead, I changed the rules.
Before the house, before the distance built between me and the window, there was the trailer.
My bed sat right against the glass, close enough that I could feel the cold of it through the wall at night, close enough that the outside world pressed itself right up against where I slept. The frame always held them; ladybugs tucked into the edges, clustered in numbers too high to count without losing track partway through.
A hundred little red shells, unmoving most nights, waiting for something I didn’t understand.
I talked to them sometimes.
Not in full sentences, not the way you talk to people. Just… small things. Thoughts that didn’t have anywhere else to go. Things I didn’t know how to say out loud during the day, or didn’t think anyone would hear the right way.
They never answered.
But they stayed.
That was enough.
When we moved, the distance changed.
The window wasn’t beside me anymore. It sat across the room, further away, something I had to look toward instead of something that surrounded me. It should have felt smaller like that.
It didn’t. It became something I reached for instead.
I learned the sky the way other kids learned rooms.
Not names, not constellations the way they were meant to be known. Not Orion or Cassiopeia or anything someone else had already decided those patterns meant. That came later, from books and lessons and stories passed down from elders among us.
Back then, I made my own.
Shapes drawn between stars that didn’t belong together, lines only I could see because I was the one deciding where they connected. Animals that moved if you looked at them long enough. Faces that shifted when you tried to focus too hard. Whole scenes that appeared and disappeared depending on where my eyes rested.
The sky wasn’t fixed.
It changed, depending on how you looked at it.
I talked to them, too.
To the stars, to the space between them, to whatever it was that stayed awake when everything else gave in. Thoughts that came easier in the dark, when no one was there to interrupt them or turn them into something else. Things that didn’t feel safe anywhere else.
The stars didn’t answer. Not the way people do. But they didn’t repeat anything either. That mattered more.
The moon was different.
It didn’t stay the same from night to night. Some evenings it filled the whole sky, bright and certain, washing everything else out until the dark itself seemed thinner around it. Other nights it pulled back, shrinking into something smaller, quieter, until it disappeared entirely and left the sky to hold itself alone.
I watched it without meaning to.
Learned its phases before I knew what they were called. Learned the rhythm of it; how it would return, how it would grow, how it would leave again without asking permission. It never felt like it was gone, not completely. Just… elsewhere. Out of reach for a while, following something I couldn’t see.
It reminded me of her.
Not in a way I understood back then, not something I could have explained if anyone had asked. Just a quiet recognition, the kind that settles in without words. Some nights she was there fully, present and warm in a way that filled the space around her. Other times she felt distant, pulled away by something I couldn’t follow, something that decided the shape of her attention the same way the moon decided its light.
I didn’t resent it. Not really.
You don’t get angry at the moon for changing. You just learn how to read it.
Cloudy nights had their own version of it.
The sky would close itself off, hiding whatever lay beyond it, but it never felt empty. The clouds moved slow enough to watch, thick shapes dragging themselves across the dark like they had somewhere to be but no urgency about getting there.
Trees shifted underneath them, their branches catching what little light there was and breaking it into pieces that moved with the wind. Fireflies stitched small, glowing paths through the air, blinking in patterns I tried to understand but never quite could.
Even without the stars, there was always something writing itself across the night.
You just had to keep watching long enough to read it.
Storms were different.
Louder, brighter, impossible to ignore.
Lightning would split the sky open for just a second, turning everything sharp and visible before sealing it back up again. I’d count without thinking; one, two, three, waiting for the thunder to follow, measuring distance in something closer than miles, something you could feel as much as hear.
The world spoke more clearly in storms.
Faster, too.
But it wasn’t the same kind of listening.
Somewhere in all of that, my eyes changed.
Or maybe they didn’t.
Maybe they had always been that way, and I just gave them enough reason to notice it.
I learned how to see in the dark.
Not the way people mean it when they say they can. Not outlines and guesses and shapes that fill themselves in if you stare long enough.
Actual seeing.
Edges where there shouldn’t be edges. Movement where the dark is supposed to swallow everything whole. Details that stay visible long after they should have disappeared.
I stopped needing light.
It felt… unnecessary.
Like speaking louder in a room where everyone already heard you just fine.
They say it’s strange. Rare, maybe.
Doc seemed to think so.
My friends have their own explanation.
Something about fae blood, about being just a little out of place from where I should be. Something old showing itself in small, inconvenient ways.
I don’t know about that.
Not really.
All I know is that I spent years teaching myself to stay awake when I should have been sleeping.
Spent years looking outward instead of closing my eyes.
Spent years talking to things that didn’t answer, because they were the only things I trusted not to.
Even now, it hasn’t quite left.
Sleep still comes late, if it comes at all. Nights still stretch longer than they should. And sometimes, without meaning to, I find myself looking out the window again, eyes adjusting without effort, picking out shapes in a sky I never quite stopped watching.
The patterns are still there.
Just… different than they used to be.
Shifting. Returning. Leaving, without ever really disappearing.
I don’t wait the same way anymore.
Not for footsteps.
Not for doors opening.
But there’s still something in the act of staying awake, in the quiet hours when everything else settles enough to listen again.
Something familiar.
Something that never really went away.
Sometimes I think that’s all insomnia is.
Not a refusal to sleep.
Just a habit of listening, that never quite learned when to stop.