Silly Symphony

I am a notoriously light sleeper. About half the nights I go to bed, I am soothed by the steady ticking of the grandfather clock in our living room. The other half I am tensed, waiting for the chiming of the bells on the half hour. They are the noises that remind me that I am not asleep. Just like all those other noises that go bump in the night. Sirens and car alarms. Neighbors coming home late at night or early in the morning. I am forever conditioned to listen for the sound of a crying baby in the next room, even if the next room is outside our window and inside the window of an apartment across the way. The happy spin on this condition, as I used to ascribe to our own crying baby, is that I don't want to miss anything.
That was why I went with mild anxiety into an overnight stay with friends sharing a hotel room. Based purely on a time equals comfort standard, I should have been happy to have the opportunity to bunk with people I have known for more than a quarter century. Theirs was the wedding that brought me and my wife to the reckoning that we might as well be together since everyone else seemed to be married to everyone else. They helped us put the first hole in the wall of our house and later returned to help construct the deck that hangs off the back. They are the godparents of my son. Why shouldn't I relax around them?
Because I don't tend to relax around anyone. Ever.
So I went with this knowledge in hand and made an effort to be an adult. Yet another challenge. When we had finished our busy day of travel and eating and wandering and eating yet again, we arrived right around bed time at our hotel. Once we had settled whose bed would be closest to the bathroom and who would be closest to the window (theirs, ours), we settled down to get some rest before our next day of eating and wandering. I made a conscious effort to get to sleep first, pulling the covers up to my neck and curling up while my wife and our friends finished up the business of their day.
Which worked well until the very small hours of the morning. There was no ticking clock or chimes. There was no traffic outside. But there were sounds. The air conditioner was on a cycle that brought it to life every forty minutes or so, shutting down after conditioning the air for ten minutes. And there were the respiratory functions of those in the room with me. I hesitate to call it snoring, since I am aware of the gift my father gave me of being able to rattle window panes and rafters when I am in full throat. I decided rather than torment myself with this newfound ambiance,  that I would use the rhythm of the collective breathing in the room to lull myself: Him, her, her, him, her, her, and slide my inhalations in there somewhere. The crescendo building to that ten minutes of air conditioning, when we would all tumble back into our rhythms.
Eventually I drifted off. For an hour. When I awoke again, I was satisfied with my efforts, and chose to roll out of bed to go for a run, where the only breathing I could hear was my own.