I live on a very thin wire. I’m looking up at it and the sky is blue and dark. Yes, I could fall. Sometimes I slip.
This wire is sleep. We have a very strange relationship lately. I sleep and wake with ease. Too much ease. It’s like a parody of the natural biological drive. Regardless of how tired or deprived or exhausted I am, I wake up after far too few hours. Usually 3 or 4, sometimes 5 or 6. The days I get 5 or 6 are successes and pass without much difference from the seemingly distant days where I would get 8 or more. They’re more pleasant than the other days, but they’re also the minority.
When the long days start dragging on is when I feel that wire. It’s a sharp thing that could cut a man to pieces, but there I am living and laughing on it. I do all the things normal people do, sometimes I even nap, but my mind feels very different. Maybe sleep deprivation is as addictive as the drugs that cause it. I have always fantasized about never having to sleep again without the mania and fatigue of insomnia. Why? Do I want to be more productive by forcing more hours into the day than other people? Not necessarily. But I also never feel like I have enough time. In this fantasy world without sleep, I’m capable of everything. Of doing everything and seeing everything and getting everything done. There isn’t that constant pressure on me to see/feel/live/do before the clock runs out and I’m dead for hours.
In reality, I’ll never be a sleepless superwoman that escapes time completely. I’m a girl who always smokes before she sleeps just so she can think for ten more minutes. I’m a girl who gets so tired she think she will cry, and when she wakes up she prays that the weather is affecting the light of the day – that it can’t possibly be that early. She looks at her phone or opens her laptop and yes, it is that early. She gives up, waits to be tired again, fears madness. She sleeps or she doesn’t, and spends the rest of the day reading or writing or thinking in a fatigued mania. Sometimes or usually she loves it.
Sometimes I just want to sleep dreamlessly for hours, because I know that sleep deprivation is a terrible beast. I consider sleeping pills, but I never take them.
I think, perhaps, the wire I see is between she (that fearful sleepless thing) and me. I wonder: Has it always been there, or has it cut us in half?
