Nighttime wakefulness and solitude

Nighttime wakefulness and solitude are both a consequence of Auden’s family life and a refuge she builds beyond it. What begins as an attempt to stay awake through her parents’ arguments becomes a lasting insomnia, organized around late-night diners, books, coffee, and long stretches of being alone. In Colby, the same hours acquire a new tension: they underline Auden’s isolation, but they also bring her into contact with the people and responsibilities she has kept at a distance.

Origins in the Household

Auden connects her insomnia to the period when her parents’ marriage began to fall apart, three years before their separation. Their relationship had long been tumultuous, and the arguments often seemed to begin with work. The conflict sharpened as Auden’s mother won an endowed chair while Auden’s father was dropped by his publisher. Their fights followed a pattern Auden learned to anticipate: a small remark over dinner, a brief exchange of sharp words, an apparent lull, and then a renewed argument around ten or eleven at night.

At first, Auden tried to interrupt that pattern by refusing to fall asleep. She left her bedroom door open and the light on, made conspicuous trips to the bathroom, and washed her hands loudly. For a while, the strategy worked. When the arguments resumed, however, her body had become accustomed to staying up late, and she was awake for every word. Wakefulness thus begins not as a chosen adventure but as vigilance: Auden tries to remain present enough to delay what she fears hearing, only to become a nightly witness to it.

When Auden’s mother finally told her across the kitchen table that the marriage was ending, Auden felt neither relief nor the crushing disappointment she had seen other children describe. The news was not a surprise, but the striking response was how little she felt. In that room with both parents, she felt small, like a child, as though the separation suddenly returned her to a childhood feeling that had been overdue. Her nocturnal routine had developed alongside the family rupture, but it did not give her a language for that response or a way to discuss it with her parents.

Ray’s Diner as a Nighttime Refuge

Ray’s Diner gives Auden somewhere to go when sleep and home alike offer little comfort. It is small, overly bright with neon, and marked by tables that are always a little sticky; its defining practical virtue is that it stays open twenty-four hours a day, every day of the year. After Auden discovers it on a drive back to her mother’s home around two in the morning, she orders coffee and apple pie and stays until sunrise. The diner seems warm and nearly safe, populated by people with at least one circumstance in common: they are awake in the middle of the night.

The refuge works partly because it does not demand intimacy. Auden can become a regular without surrendering her solitude. Exchanges are brief, and nobody asks her for more than she wants to give. She reads or studies in a booth and tips a dollar for each hour she stays, letting the night pass through a predictable routine. Ray’s is not a cure for insomnia; it gives her a place where being awake does not have to be explained.

That solitude is not seamless. At two, three, or four in the morning, Auden sometimes looks up from her books at truckers, interstate travelers stopping for coffee, and the occasional eccentric and feels that she does not belong there. The feeling recalls the moment of her parents’ separation: she imagines that she should be at home, asleep in bed like the people she will see at school in a few hours. But the unease passes, and the diner settles back into its familiar order. When Julie returns with the coffeepot, Auden pushes her cup toward the edge of the table, a quiet signal that she intends to stay. The gesture captures the arrangement’s appeal: recognition without a conversation about what troubles her.

Isolation Carried into Colby

The move to Colby changes the geography of Auden’s sleeplessness without ending it. After a day spent working at Clementine’s, she usually leaves around five, eats a sandwich while working until closing, walks the boardwalk for about an hour, then goes home for her car and drives for another three or four hours. The sequence gives the night a structure, but its repetition also measures how little the new town has yet become a place of connection for her.

Auden tests alternatives to the familiar all-night diner she had known at home. The Wheelhouse Diner is about thirty-five miles away, but its narrow booths smell of bleach, its coffee is watery, and the waitresses give her dirty looks if she stays longer than a meal. More often she stops at Gas/Gro, buys a large travel cup of coffee, and drinks it while driving. Within two weeks she knows Colby backward and forward, though that knowledge does not resolve the loneliness that sent her out. By midnight, after walking the boardwalk and driving a full circuit of Colby, she still has several hours before she wants to go home and heads to Gas/Gro for coffee.

This routine sets Auden apart from the town’s visible social life. She notices people lingering at Clementine’s after their shifts, unpaid and by choice, while others gather around the bike shop; to her, Colby seems to spend all day hanging around. Yet her own prolonged nights are another kind of hanging on. She moves through the same town repeatedly, but does so alone, using motion and coffee to fill the hours rather than joining the groups she observes.

From Solitude to Care

A night with Thisbe reveals that Auden’s wakefulness can also carry her toward another person. When the baby continues crying, Auden has unpacked her clothes, tried to read an economics textbook, and cleared her phone messages within about forty minutes. Bored and unable to settle, she puts on a jacket and goes for a walk—not initially to the Tip, but for air and distance from the noise, and to process the earlier strain between herself and her father.

Later, after Thisbe starts crying again, Auden hears Heidi leave her room and go to the baby. Thisbe continues for an hour, long after Auden’s own tears have dried. Auden goes into the hallway and finds Heidi exhausted and tear-streaked in the rocking chair. She offers to take the baby so Heidi can rest. Heidi hesitates, then lets Auden step forward and take Thisbe into her arms. The episode does not erase Auden’s insomnia or turn the night into a simple resolution. It does, however, interrupt the pattern in which she stays awake chiefly as a solitary observer. The hours that once trained her to listen for conflict also make her attentive to another person’s exhaustion, allowing solitude to become, briefly, a form of presence.