The Little Sleep

Hope is a desperate man's currency.

Being lost isn't the same as being nowhere. Being lost is worse because there's the false hope that you might be found.

I’m like a friend admitting some reprehensible bit of behavior that forever warps and taints the relationship. Only I’m not a friend. I think I understand her obvious discomfort. Strangers are supposed to lie.

I know you were lying to me the whole night. That's OK because I lied to you too. I said I didn’t remember what I felt like before my accident, before I became the narcoleptic me. I remember what it felt like. I was awake, always awake. I didn’t miss anything. I could read books for more than a few pages at a time. I didn’t smoke. I watched movies from start to finish in real goddamn theaters, wouldn’t even leave my seat to go to the bathroom. I stayed up late on purpose. Woke up and went to sleep when I wanted. Sleep was my pet, something I control, schedule, took for walks. Sit up, roll over, lie down, stay down, give me your fucking paw. Not now, only me, and everything else is on the periphery. Just slightly out of reach or out of touch or out of time. I don’t have a real career or a real life. Ellen supports me and I sleepwalk through the rest.

Now I'm thinking about letters, the molecules of sentences and songs, the bricks of words.

Now there's only me and everything else is on the periphery, just slightly out of reach or out of touch or out of time.

I sit on the couch like a dropped piano.

As if 'careful' ever has anything to do with Narcolepsy.

I'm tired. I'm always tired. It's part of being me.

I remember everything I lost. That’s what I remember. The loss and loss and loss….

Sleep is coming. I feel it. At least this time, I want it.

That's what courage is, dumbass perseverance.

It’s easy to think the worst when it always happens.

Most people think I really could keep from falling asleep if I wanted to. If I just focused, like narcolepsy is some algebraic equation I could solve if I worked at it hard enough, did all the homework. I'm a bad joke, a punchline.

They think I'm lazy or just odd.

Truth is usually greeted with disdain.

Sleep is heavy. It has mass.

But my lights are dimming a bit already, an encroaching numbness to the excitement and bustle around me.

Because waiting in lines is detrimental to my tenuous mental state, I walk toward the front.

But that's how time works for me. My constant enemy, it attacks whenever I'm not looking.

I have the sense that a lot of time has passed. Or maybe just a little. I have no way of knowing.

That murk, it’s always there. It's both a threat and a promise. I am narcoleptic.

I'm a name and a question.