Silver Medals

The sleeping itself is easy. Exhaustion falls over me like heavy rain, wells up from somewhere near my center, and so it is nothing to crumple up into sleep seemingly moments after getting home. An hour, or more likely two, and then the waking world can seep back in, slowly. No energy to cook, and so dinner ends up half-hearted and weirdly cobbled together, and it doesn't matter because it's really just a gesture, a placeholder, until the real sleeping can begin. Dreams are too vivid, too full of movement and confusion, too exhausting; they linger too much after they should be disappeared evaporated. I wake up, still, more times than I keep track of -- sometimes for hours. But the sleeping itself, that is easy. In the Sleep Olympics, I would surely win at least a silver medal -- for quantity, at least, if not for quality.

I am someone else, but half inside her head and half observing, in that cinematic way that is like reading the story (or writing the story, perhaps) while watching the movie, all at once. I'm in danger, and in an apartment with a group of people -- or a hotel room, a large one -- and they are meant to protect me and I am not allowed to be alone and it is making me insane. One of them has bought me tweezers, because I couldn't bring any with me, or I've lost mine, and they are the kind that come to needle-sharp points, and I complain loudly about this to everyone, because I hate those kinds of tweezers (and indeed, I do hate those kinds of tweezers); I go into the bathroom and don't close the door entirely, because someone might somehow sneak in and hurt me and then nobody would hear. Then I am standing at a sink, a counter, in a large and open room, beside a woman who tells me I could have gotten up 20 minutes later, and would still have had plenty of time. I am tired of her, and her advice, and tell her so. I throw a palmful of water in her face from the sink. She splashes me back. I am holding a piece of paper in my right hand while trying to brush my teeth with my left; it's a drawing, or a painting. I can't see it clearly; it shifts and melts and changes. Some water gets on it, and I stand and wave it back and forth, in the air, trying to dry it. I need it for a contest, or a meeting, or something I am trying very hard to be on time for. I'm in my old elementary school, except it isn't, searching for a particular classroom. I can't find it, and the hallways multiply, and I don't remember what I'm looking for. The building keeps turning into other buildings. There's a room I find, enormous, and it is full of people waiting in a line, and sitting in chairs, also waiting, and I get into the line with a group of people I am with whose faces are not clear or fixed. You are sitting in a chair, suddenly, and I leave the line to stand beside you, and you smile in a small exasperated way and gesture to your chest -- looking at the people I was with, in case they didn't see me walk over to wait with you. You put one hand around my waist, palm resting gently against my hip, and even then -- in a dream, where it shouldn't matter and I should be able to do whatever I want, and there shouldn't be rules and constraints -- I'm conscious of not doing anything in public that would upset you, that would broadcast any truth. I don't lean against you, don't touch you, and apart from your palm warm against my hip, you don't touch me. We are in a hospital, in line for something, and I'm holding a piece of paper in my hand, and I want to sit on your lap and wrap myself around you but I don't, because there are so many people around us and I am so careful of you, when I see you in public places (even if you don't believe it). You ask me if I'm nervous, and I tell you I sucked ribbons of wine through my teeth, just before I left, to uncoil things inside myself. So that I wouldn't be impatient, waiting. So that I wouldn't be afraid. A woman -- a nurse, or some random woman in the hospital -- takes me home with her. Her house is enormous and shiny and screams out money. We walk through the rooms, and I'm afraid to touch anything. We go into the kitchen, and she offers to make me dinner, and the kitchen is enormous and gleaming and pristine, and I think This is nothing like my mother's kitchen, all mismatched crockery and signs of wear, (and I am someone else, because this is not my thought, and not a thought that I would ever have, and it isn't true besides). I am wearing a silk dressing gown and so is she, and we are standing in her bedroom and I have tried to seduce her, or she me, and one of us is nervous and unsure, and it's the next morning and she is leaving for the airport, and I am not leaving for anywhere yet, and she gives me her keys, tells me how to lock up behind myself when I leave, and I think how weird and lovely it is, for a total stranger to trust you with their life, their house, their everything. Now I am someone else again, and she is a man -- her husband, perhaps -- and he has just brought me home, and we walk out of the house and through the city, looking for a restaurant to have dinner, or a drink, or just a place to sit and talk. I say awful things to him, and he doesn't care until suddenly he does, and he asks me why I think I can get away with being so horrible, and I smile (I am someone else) and tell him that until he leaves for the airport in the morning, I am all his -- he chose this, after all, and wouldn't want his wife to know -- and he will have to put up with whatever I choose to give him. We are back in his house, and undressed for bed, and he wants me to lie beside him and I do not want to; I want to lie beside him and he doesn't want me to. I drop a book on the floor, and start laughing and tell him it's just like this book, and I name the author, and he doesn't know what I'm talking about, and I tell him that I've mentioned this before. How he used to work with me, and then he left, and one of his clients was in independent publishing and, to supplement his payment for a job, published 75 copies of each of his books. He never gave me a copy of a single one, but here, now, there is one in my hands. He still cannot recall me ever saying anything like this to him before, and I am irritated. In the morning, he shows me a safe beside the bed, in the bedside table, where I should leave the keys when I leave, and he is gone and I'm finally alone and I walk into the bathroom and turn on the shower and then I am awake.

I wake too early and too entirely and cannot get back to sleep. I lay quietly in bed beneath the covers, in the dark, and think about how I cannot truly touch you, even in my dreams. After that, the rest of the day will taste like sadness.