SunsLight

My life turned into a ScandiNoir horror as soon as the solstice wiped sleep from the sky

The Moon Falls a Thousand Times, Naeemeh Naeemaei, 2019

‘Quetiapine, sold under the brand name Seroquel among others, as an atypical antipsychotic medication used for the treatment of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and major depressive disorder. Despite being widely used as a sleep aid due to its sedating effect, the benefits of such may not outweigh it undesirable side effects…Common side effects include sleepiness, constipation, weight gain, and dry mouth. Other side effects include low blood pressure with standing, seizures, a prolonged erection, high blood sugar, tardive dyskinesia, and neuroleptic malignant syndrome. In older people with dementia, its use increases the risk of death…

And it stops working when you don’t have blinds during the height of summer in the Northern Hemisphere.

My relationship with sleep is somewhat similar to that between Persephone and Hades. If hell, magic, love - and now a large dog - were swept up in a Mediterranean fever dream of drenched linens and pained limbs from traveling to and fro, hoping your fresh picked flowers won’t wilt on the journey down the dim light caverns of the underworld…then you have an idea of my attempt not to sleep 12 hours a night. I’ve had many tests, drs, and meds over the years to help stabilise these journeys but the only thing that really helps is an extremely specific set of circumstances, and luck, for me to get some sleep with dreams akin to Inside Out rather than The Cell. One day I might write properly about sleep - and hope I don’t get punished for it when I go to bed - but this is not that time. What has driven me to so openly share an aspect of my life I usually keep to myself is that my carefully built system imploded last month due to the simple fact that I couldn’t hide from the sun. The damned thing followed me everywhere and possibly made an enemy for life.

I recently moved flats in a state of chaos; fleeing into the Brighton property market hoping to find a suitable place to live with two animals and a foreign passport in less than a month for the sanity and safety of us all. This may sound reckless, and it cost a fortune, but I did find a place. I could still smell the paint of the white box renovation when I walked in the first time to this flat on the hills looking out to the sea. It was a sort of miracle to find it, it had a washing machine and allowed pets, and the view was spectacular. I have moved an I-don’t-want-to-count-able times since 2016, which is one of the reasons it took me so long to get my ‘gat in rat’, as Afrikaans people say, and actually do it this time. This fresh new space that let me connect to viewing the comings and goings of the weather as clouds and rain moved in from the sea, in a way I hadn’t been able to do since I left Johannesburg, seemed like the perfect escape from a world turned toxically narrow through the delusions of daytime soap opera psychosis enforced by an unstable neighbour. Here I could finally write my PhD. Or at least pretend to write it in a more convincing fashion.

Along with the slow drudgery of settling all the administrative things that crop up with a move, some more painful than other (damn you Scottish Power I will have my revenge), I was rather happily turning this new place into a hermits cave of reclusion’s delight. There was just one tiny problem that I hadn’t seen coming - and as I write this the Westworld version of House of the Rising Sun by Ramon Djawadi starts playing on my laptop. I ordered blinds for the flat as soon as I moved in. It was an expense I had to take. In my previous overseas flats I had always gone for the readymade stuff and they never fit. In Canada I ended up with the most awkward gaps in my blinds just where I didn’t want them so that they never served their purpose. This time I was going to go for the real thing. But the real thing means waiting a month. Not just any month. The month…of June.

For my readers from the South this may not seem that ominous. We don’t get radical time changes with the seasons and because South Africa is a sensible country (well about this) we don’t have daylight saving time. But in the United Kingdom the clocks go back for summer in an antiquated custom that most people can only explain as, ‘something to do with farming’. And I am so peeved with the situation that I am not going to explain what this farming palaver is and why it has no more bearing on society today. In reality it means that during summer the sun stays up later and later until light is still visible way past a 30something year olds bedtime and even passes the 20 years olds on a weekday. By June we are looking at daylight blue hour lasting until 22:00ish at its height. And the whole thing starts up again just before 04:00ish. I am sure some birds aren’t a fan of this. The seagulls who now have little gulls to feed can’t be that impressed by having to go find chips when they have hardly had any sleep? It is only after the summer solstice that the moon can linger in darkness and not have to share the stage with the suns overpowering presence.

So there I was at 21:00 on the first night, utterly exhausted and mentally depleted - in a state that might welcome decent sleep - in my bed with the light streaming in its reflection bouncing off the bare white walls creating the perfect asylum isolation room with a viewing window fit for a fringe festival audience realising my mistake. My cat Skadu had already settled into his half of the bed and snored happily unaware of the cartoonish red lines snaking towards my pupils as the clock moved towards 22:00 and the light remained, if hinting at blues that 70s Brit crime films might adore. At this point you might rightfully by rolling your eyes at my overly dramatic self for not taking the simple way out and just getting an eye mask. Well, I do have one. A fancy silk one, that skinny white ladies with perfect skin told me would keep me young and came in such perfect package that it sat in my flat for months before I could throw it out. On that first night I couldn’t find it, on the second my poor teething pup got hold of it and turned it into crime scene evidence, by the third I found out that the washing machine I had so longed for was cover in rust and dirt, by the fourth I was having it out with my agent about getting it replaced…and you may be able to guess how long it took for me to get that sorted out. I did come up with what I thought was an ingenious plan by day two. I draped my darkest and thickest bedding over the window. And here begins another series of daily attempts at getting my linen sheet to cover as much space as possible while letting me keep some fresh air circulating into a room I shared with a cat, his food, and his litter box. There were multiple times while I drifted through the rafters of sleep dodging cobwebs I didn’t realise I hadn’t removed that my eyes would dramatically snap open as a section of my makeshift curtain dropped exposing me to the sniggering light of endless summer combined with the safety street lights of suburbia. And so a more than usual madness worked its way into a mind that was generally rather at home with the concept in general.

The signs began with my inability to work. Not from my more usual anxious depressive procrastination but because sitting at my desk the incecent light was creating a new form of pain that lingered in my eyes and forehead. Looking at articles with those black letters on blinding white made reading impossible. I took to wearing sunglasses inside the flat - not in a way that Anna Wintour would approve of since I was dressed in the few clean clothes I had left thanks to the ominous gorgon washing machine, with my newly discovered curly hair in a mushy bun that was at least three days old. At least the sunglasses were Chanel. It was not as if the days were sunny in the generic sense. The summer in Brighton has been a string of grey swatches sweeping in from the sea. It was if the grey blasted against the white walls with the power of a nuclear bomb leaving me as the shadow left behind for people to find later. I couldn’t see properly anymore, even with the sunglasses the light still hurt something deep within my brain. There was no watching television at ‘night’. My rolling list of comfort watches had an orb reflected in them wherever I went. I was being followed from room to room, at all times. And the worst of it seemed to be that this thing that insisted on infiltrating so deeply into my psyche didn’t bring any warmth with it. The cold and damp has persisted through summer with the sun only daining to bring smatterings of its rays of heat to Brighton in 24 hour parcels.

There are books, films and television shows about the endless sun of the Artic and Antarctic and its effects on the human psyche. Less so of the latter, possibly because penguins are so cute and silly you can’t go crazy and kill people. These dark twisted mysteries build the tension of sleeplessness and bleak landscapes as if it is only natural that these are places that lend themselves to twisting the mind. But people have successfully lived in these parts of the world for millennia, surely with no more homicidal tendencies than any other community. Instagram influencers living in these places happily show off their cozy ‘exotic’ lifestyles’ in Svalbard, no madness in sight. So why did this month’s endless sunlight tip me further and further away from functionality and sanity?

It came down to not having control over my environment. I could not outrun the sun. There was no space of darkness, which my brain associated with rest and comfort. Is it unique to our species that we need to control our environment? Surely even the most supposedly laid back, at one with the universe, weed induced spiritualist has some preferences. And shaping our lives in relation to the sun and moon is as ancient a human need as wanting to pet the fluffy puppy, even if it will bite your hand off Crunk. The rhythm of the moon as sleep and a space in which the body rests pulses through us. As does the sun rising to awaken us like little fires on the earths surface. When that rhythm is broken or erratic you can’t rely on the moon and the sun anymore. You have to reach out to anything else around you, the mollifying temporary esculent forgeries of normality. It is a daily practice that takes constructing an environment to mimic sun and moon while others get to have the real thing for free. It is this which made June so dangerously unbearable; I had to barter with the real sun at its zenith, knowing each day was getting longer , not knowing when my blinds would be here, seeing deadlines fly by with no work done and nights drag on in past places. Logically I knew it would end but my mind been burnt grey.

But it did end. I have blinds. They have given me a schedule, of sorts, and made work possible (no sunglasses). I will always have complicated feelings towards the sun and possibly a preference to the moon. Maybe the lesson here is that I had not realised how powerful the seasons, and in particular the sun, really were in this world where we can are reaching the point of being able to live in a meta-verse supposedly divorced of our bodies. We are more fragile, and linked to our environment then we realise. It is only when that environment changes for the worse that we are forced to acknowledge this. And soon everyone will have to live with that reality. Not just for a month but for good as there won’t be blinds to fix the problem. For now I doubt my body will ever acclimatise to Northern seasons. But as long as I can have some darkness to sleep it should be fine…right?

P.S.

I would like to thank my parents for supporting me throughout my move. It would not have possible without them.