How I Parked My Thoughts Before Sleep
For three weeks, I had been going to bed with a mountain on my chest.
It wasn’t one problem. If it had been one, I could have handled it, probably. It was all of them: the science project, the library book I had lost, the group chat I hadn’t answered, the thing I said to my cousin at dinner, my math grade, and a small, mysterious squeak in my backpack.
My brain’s rule was simple: You are not allowed to sleep until everything is solved.
The trouble with that rule is that it is Monday night, 11:20, and almost nothing can be solved on a Monday night at 11:20. The library is closed. My cousin is asleep. The squeak is still squeaking.
What if I forget one of them?
What if I sleep and something falls apart?
When will I ever catch up?
You can’t fix a Tuesday problem on a Monday night
I tried to explain it all to Zoe at lunch. I talked for so long that her sandwich got lonely.
“Okay,” she said, when I finally ran out of breath. “Which of these can you fix tonight, at midnight, in your pajamas?”
I looked at my list. I thought about it honestly.
“…The squeak? Maybe.”
“And the rest?”
“No. The library opens at eight. My cousin wakes up at seven. The project is due Friday.”
“So,” said Zoe, “you’re staying awake all night to solve problems that are not available until morning.” She said it kindly, the way you tell a friend they have been wearing their sweater inside out all day.
Something in my chest loosened by exactly one notch.
· · ·
The parking lot
After school, Zoe unrolled a big sheet of paper on her bedroom floor and drew a rectangle with white lines. “This,” she announced, “is the Tomorrow Parking Lot.”
“Is it a game?”
“It’s a system. Every worry gets a parking space. Each space has a time, and a car that is not driving anywhere until then.”
We drew little cars, one for each problem. The library book got a small blue car parked at 8:00 AM. My cousin got a yellow one at after school, one kind text. The project got a green truck at Wednesday, one hour. Even the squeak got a tiny red car at Saturday, open the backpack.
I know it sounds silly, but as each car rolled into its space, something in me went quiet. The worry was not gone. It was parked. It had an address, a time, and a plan for when to come back.
“The lot closes at night,” said Zoe. “Cars don’t drive around at 11 PM. That’s the rule.”
Closing the gate
That night, I did it in my own notebook. I drew my own tiny parking lot, with six spaces and six little cars. It took seven minutes. When I finished, I drew a gate across the bottom of the page, the way you draw a fence, and I wrote underneath it: Lot closed until 8 AM.
I won’t pretend that my brain applauded. It tried, twice, to drive a car out of the lot. The library book was the loudest. Each time I said, quietly, “That one’s parked until eight,” and looked at the gate.
Somewhere between the second try and the third, I stopped counting cars and fell asleep.
In the morning, I found the library book under my bed, exactly where a book would be if a person had stopped checking for it at midnight. The cousin text took one sentence, and he replied with three hearts. The project took the whole of Wednesday. The squeak was a pencil sharpener.
I do not fix my whole life before I sleep anymore. I just park it. The cars are always there when I wake up. They are just much smaller in daylight.
With love,
Lina
