Teenage Insomnia

Written by Millie, July 29

It’s two in the morning, and I can’t sleep.

Lately, I haven’t been able to fall asleep until close to four or five in the morning.

I toss and turn (and drive Kate crazy) until I finally sink into the shallow recesses of sleep.

This is made worse if I don’t talk to Jesse before I go to bed. It just feels wrong not to hear his voice before I try to sleep.

I miss him more than ever. There isn’t much that can distract me from thinking about him. I sit and read all day to try and escape into another world, and it works for the most part. But the second my eyes leave the page, my mind goes straight back to Jesse.

My birthday is coming up. In less than a month, I will turn 16. I should be excited, but the thing I want most for my birthday is the thing I am pretty confident I won’t get.

I want to go home.

I want to spend this milestone birthday with my friends.

Even just for a little while, I want to go and see my friends and the people I love. I miss them, and I can’t stand being away from them.

I have cried almost every night since I got here. I wish I had my own room again so I could be free to go to pieces in private, but I have to deal with Kate coming in at random times, so that freedom is denied to me. I don’t like crying in front of other people when I can’t even explain to them why I am crying.

I love my family, but I want other company than them, and to be honest, I don’t want to deal with meeting more people that I am just going to leave in two years. Mom and Dad keep insisting I go out and meet people, but I don’t want to make friends with people that I am just leaving. I don’t want to have to do that again. It hurts too much.

Mom had said it was a possibility to send me back for my birthday a few months ago when I first broached the subject, but I don’t know if she’s even thought about it at all since then. I doubt she even remembers.

What I wanted to do was stay in Albany until the end of the summer so I could spend my birthday with my friends without the cost of flying me back and forth, but they weren’t too keen on that.

I haven’t told anyone about wanting to go home for my birthday. I guess I’m writing it down here because I know that Mom and Dad will read it. And because I can’t sleep and they have been asking me to write another blog for a few weeks.

If I don’t go home for my birthday, I won’t see anyone from Albany until Christmas, when Jesse and his family come to St. Croix. I don’t want to wait until Christmas, and although Jesse is my main motivation for going, I want to see my other friends as well.

Unless Jesse packs my best friends in his suitcase, I don’t get to see anyone else until March or June. These aren’t completely random dates, I promise. March is mine and Jesse’s one year anniversary, and June is his graduation. I’m going to one or both.

Time for me to go back and lay down. I would say time to sleep, but I know I won’t. Not only do I suffer from teenage insomnia, but I have really bad cramps. I swear they are worse than they are on the mainland.