My mother told me that when she was a little girl, there were times she couldn’t sleep at night. “I would lie in bed and imagine that somewhere in the world there must be a single gas station that was open,” she said. “Then I didn’t feel so alone and could go back to sleep.”
Her story comforted me, too, when I was awake in the quiet darkness. I could picture that same gas station—the pump out front and a light on inside, with one guy at the desk reading a magazine. Somehow, the world wasn’t so scary and I wasn’t so lonely.
Of course, even when my mother was a child, there must have been a hospital open at night or a police station. And after all, it was daytime on the other side of the planet. But those are things that don’t necessarily occur to a small child. They didn’t occur to me.
Just recently, I was remembering my mother’s imaginary gas station when I couldn’t sleep—and thought that now, there are countless businesses open twenty-four hours a day. And I wondered, are we comforted?
Or is the world too wide awake now, too round-the-clock, nonstop? Sometimes, it’s hard to sleep, just thinking about it.