Things are exactly what they seem: I am back to sleeping often and through entire days. I wake up expecting a nap when I get home from work. Yesterday I got home and took my special nap. I woke up for two hours to cook a dinner using milk I didn’t know had expired. It tasted fine but poured thick. I check my horoscope when I wake up at 5:45. I hit snooze until 7 and deeply regret rolling around in my sweat for an extra hour. When I feel like it, I sit in a library and nap there.
I sleep at midnight and have really vivid dreams that are all the same: Someone has just died and there are holes in the bottoms of my front teeth. The left is worse than the right. I can’t actually smell the things I remember in my dreams.
I couldn’t sleep until 4 the other night: I looked around my room for something that might help. I like to hear friendly voices when I can’t sleep. I went through my phone to see if maybe there was something hidden there for me to find once I’d decided I had enough of being friendly back. My phone rang and I screened it to force whoever was on the other end to leave a voicemail, to say things to me there, which I could play back over and over to inspect for tone, rhetoric, syntax, thought. It was an automated call.
My dreams are all the same and they read like nightmares when I think too hard: I am at a house I never belonged in and I’m in a kitchen with a faceless man. We are cooking something or other, I am brandishing a dull knife lazily, telling the faceless person less damage comes from a dull knife than a sharp one. He disagrees. He takes a sharp pairing knife to his index finger. His finger is pale and perfect for him and knuckly. A paper cut appears. I laugh and grab at his hand. He laughs with me. I take my knife, still laughing, and slice his palm wide open, pressing down hard to prove my point effectively of course. I take his palm to my mouth and suck up all the parts of him I can get.
I wasn’t paying close attention today and sat in the sun thinking about how I’d have the same dream tonight: I’ve got a sunburn over my right shoulder now.
