My body had no more feeling than a drowned corpse. It was literally true: I was going through life asleep. No one in my family, not one of my friends or classmates, realized that I was going through life asleep. I lost fifteen pounds that month, and no one noticed. And the strangest thing was that no one noticed. I would walk and eat and talk to people inside my drowsiness. Weird, I would think as the drowsiness overtook me, I’m in my own shadow. The wakefulness was always there beside me.
All I wanted was to throw myself down and sleep. My pencil or my purse or my fork would clatter to the floor. The drowsiness would overtake me at regular, wavelike intervals: on the subway, in the classroom, at the diner table. I couldn’t get an accurate fix on the things around me-their distance or mass or texture.
The incomplete drowsiness would continue on and off all day. I was both a body on the verge of sleep and a mind determined to stay awake. My physical self was drifting through the feeble morning light, and all the while it could feel my mind staring, breathing, close beside it. I would feel a hint of drowsiness, but my mind was there, in its own room, on the other side of a transparent wall, watching me. My fingertips were just barely brushing against the outermost edge of sleep. I wanted to do everything once and for all and be through with it.įinally, as the sky began to grow light in the morning, I’d feel that I might be drifting off. It seemed silly to wash one day when I would only have to wash again the next. Only for me, the long perspective of shades that set off one box from the next had suddenly snapped up, and I could see day after day after day glaring ahead of me like a white, broad, infinitely desolate avenue.
#SLEEPLESS NIGHTS QUOTES SERIES#
I saw the days of the year stretching ahead like a series of bright, white boxes, and separating one box from another was sleep, like a black shade. The reason I hadn’t washed my clothes or my hair was because it seemed so silly.
My mother told me I must have slept, it was impossible not to sleep in all that time, but if I slept, it was with my eyes wide open, for I had followed the green, luminous course of the second hand and the minute hand and the hour hand of the bedside clock through their circles and semi-circles, every night for seven nights, without missing a second, or a minute, or an hour.
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