Whenever I hear this song, I think back to the days just after I’d returned to my country from a three-week trip. I wouldn’t call them the best days of my life, but they were days of rare peace. Despite all that had happened in the months before, and all that was still to come, I felt a quiet stillness within myself.
I remember waking up that morning not too early, not too late. For once, I had time just for myself, as Mochi and Miso were no longer living with me then. As usual, I brewed a V60 pour-over coffee and put on my familiar playlist. Among the old songs, there was a new one I’d just added: “Can’t Sleep Anymore.” I didn’t know what the artist meant by those words, but to me they carried a strange mix: fulfilment laced with regret, a nervous excitement for whatever lay ahead. And that was exactly how I felt in those last days of June.
It’s difficult to name the emotions that passed through me then. I had just returned from a three-week alone trip to four unfamiliar cities in Australia and New Zealand, where I spent most of my time wandering through cafés, suffering foods, and ending the nights a little too drunk, though happily so. My mother had been gone for less than a month. I still missed her deeply, yet no tears would come. I had just stepped out of a complicated relationship that left me both thrilled and stuck. I already sold my apartment and rented it back for the last three months in Vietnam, yet every time I woke up, I still felt as if it belonged to me, maybe because the walls still echoed with too many memories. I had a decent job that opened many doors, but also cost me dearly in time and energy. I also had my last day in August, yet going to work each day still felt difficult. My family still loved me, yet I found myself wrestling with the weight of loving and being loved by them. I no longer had my dogs with me; losing them was painful, but also a lesson in detachment and letting go. I had achieved much, failed just as often, and still sensed there was so much more to learn and feel from this life.
That was when I realised I “couldn’t sleep anymore.” The peace was real, yet beneath it stirred an unnamed urgency, a quiet pull toward something I had not yet discovered. I didn’t know what it was, only that it was waiting for me, and that I would move toward it soon enough.
And so I smiled to myself, holding on to that strange but gentle morning: a moment of stillness and significance I would always recall whenever this song returned to me.
Lam Hà 