Sleep don't come easy is a handwoven textile work from 2016 in which Diedrick Brackens weaves together cotton, nylon, chenille yarn, and cotton fabric into a dense, layered composition that operates simultaneously as painting, narrative, and object. The work measures roughly 155 by 132 centimeters, a scale that commands presence while retaining an intimacy rooted in the handmade. Brackens employs the loom as a conceptual instrument, building imagery through the interlacing of threads rather than the application of pigment, so that color, texture, and form emerge from structural decisions woven directly into the cloth itself. The title carries the quiet weight of sleeplessness and unresolved longing, themes that recur throughout Brackens's practice as he draws on Black American vernacular traditions, queer experience, and folkloric symbolism to create works that hold personal and collective histories in equal tension. Cotton, a material carrying deep and fraught significance within African American history, is here reclaimed as a medium of agency and artmaking, its connotations transformed through the artist's deliberate, labor-intensive process. The layering of different fiber types, from the soft bulk of chenille to the slight sheen of nylon, introduces subtle variation in how light moves across the surface, giving the work a visual complexity that rewards sustained looking. Originally exhibited at the Hammer Museum, this signed work represents Brackens at a formative moment in a practice that has since earned significant critical and institutional recognition. For collectors, it offers a rare combination of material richness, conceptual depth, and historical resonance, a textile object that functions as both art historical statement and deeply felt human document.