There was a period of my life during which I was so happy that I could not sleep. The second night, sleep was already such a mysterious object of desire that I worried it would elude me for the rest of the week. I woke up before dawn broke and wondered to the red lines on my alarm clock, is this okay? I was so happy that I listened to piano covers of pop songs with the sound turned up loud, through my earphones.I ate dried peas and thought, I should write this in my journal, in one of the recent empty pages. But it’s hard to write about your day when you can’t find the right pen. I wrote about feeling guilty that I drain the lightbulb in my salt lamp a lot on the nights when I don’t want to even attempt the sprint from the lightswitch to my bed. I listened to “Hometown Glory” and wondered if I had now become both a morning and a night person, that is, a person who is wide awake and willing to jerk her body around at both times. I had spent the previous weekend reading and reading and reading after an anxious realization that if I wanted to go home for a long weekend, I had to do some reading ahead of time. I did a week’s worth in those two days: If you switch from reading to studying every half hour, you can read this entire book long before it’s due. But I forced myself to do much more than was necessary, because it feels great to cross tasks out in Sharpie until you cannot see what the original task was. A long dash across the entire day is also useful.
Because I had spent the weekend thinking about the near future (which was a little more than a week away), I was focused on meeting the future and nothing could get in my way before I was on the future’s doorstep. I mean the garage door, because there’s a spider’s nest strung across our side doorway and I’m willing to bet it has made it through September, just as I have. Sleep, then, was useless to my reading eyes (although not during the weekend, apparently). I spent one bad night feeling the air duct in my room and sighing loudly. The next night, after blurred words and “a false or unusual sense of well-being,” I was much more cautious and made a point to not step on sleep’s toes.
-Taylor Ray
Image Source: http://hypemuch.com/2013/04/03/paintings-surreal-sleep-drunk-vademecum-by-tania-blanco/