Dreamless

When I was four I stayed up a solid 24 hours, dragging my poor abuelita past the midnight hour, storming through the blackness of 6 am. As a preschooler I despised nap time. To paraphrase Roger Ebert, I hated nap timed. Hated, hated, hated it. I was wide awake in a room full of alphabet clouds and big bold blues, greens, and whites: summer, winter, fall and spring all at once on the poster boards. The cosmic balance of the universe, the barrier forming order out of chaos, a thin black cross, kept the sun from melting the ice which would have caused an avalanche, killing the roses and the little boy skipping to school in his shorts.
It was me alone in that quiet, motionless sea of young bodies wrapped in corduroy. My classmates floated in dreams, I floated on a red mat firmly rooted to the carpet. My only dreams were of the day variety; they were the only stimulus I had for two hours--those, and the questions. I wondered if the teacher knew she had the most beautiful legs I had ever seen, and if she realized I stared at them when she taught us the days of the week. Would the cafeteria serve the best brownies in the world tomorrow, served up on white paper discs? Is papi coming home with surprises hiding behind his giant mustache which unfolds upon the world like a pair of giant batwings [note to reader: do you know the Spanish word for mustache? I'm looking for a particular term that starts with a "b" it might be slang, or possibly a variation created by a 4 yr old mind]--long, dark, and curly?

I tossed and turned and fiddled, very much like I do now as an adult. Fingers twiddling frantically, a glass ball of lighting in a madman's lab. My legs would open and close, flapping without purpose, rubbing...rubbing. My penis caught in the cleavage of my inner thigh and underoos. In these long waitings I discovered myself accidentally. I do not remember the first time I masturbated, all I know is it was there, and it would become a daily activity (and nightly) as I tried to surf through the boredom. I enjoyed the tingle but desired no one.

I've often wondered if these habits said anything about me specifically. Was my sleeplessness at this age a sign of a specific personality? Did it imply something about my home life? Was it a signifier for a learning disability or worse?(My sister was tested, rigorously, and found to have ADD. Papi has an anxiety disorder. Our grandmother wandered the halls of schizophrenia in an asylum). At the end of the day, was it simply the sign of a stentorian imagination, already cultivating my first superhero myth-life?

One time, I wet myself because I had nothing else to do.