There comes that point in the night when you can't sleep, and you just think, if I sleep now, I'll get only six hours of sleep.
So you try to sleep, testing it out by closing your eyes a couple of times to see how it suits, and when it doesn't stick, you're totally okay with it. You shrug, and it becomes: I can get five. Totally. I've functioned on five hours of sleep!
You almost enjoy it, and you try to do something fun like watch 30 Rock on Netflix because wifi is really strong and you never have time to really settle and watch sitcoms on your laptop during the day. It's sort of like how you felt when you were twelve and you stayed up during a sleepover watching The Princess Diaries.
But after a few episodes, you think that you should really go to bed, because you aren't twelve anymore and you know you have work in the morning, and slowly, it's dwindled to four hours till you have to wake up. You shut off your lamp, you close your computer, and you roll over in your blankets, ready for sleep to grace you. You know the drill.
Let's go for four!
After what feels like an hour of tossing and turning, you're nowhere near sleep, and you figure that this time can be put to good use, rather than wasted and made worst by dwelling on each passing millisecond. So you decide to get up and clean your computer. You noticed how slow it started going. You start small, going through the downloads on file, cleaning out your trash can, and sorting through e-mails. You can't believe that you have 800 on there!
Then it gets really good. You get really into it and pull out your external hard drive and backup your entire computer. You decide to make new folders to organize your stories, renaming some so it's more than just "HellYeah" and "Teehee," and you stumble on old files from when you had that Compaq back in the day. These files are from when you had to share a computer, so these are simply called "George1" and "George2."
Out of sentimentality, you decide to read through them. It's early writing. Melodramatic with weddings and car scenes and what you remember to be strokes of brilliance on your part at age twelve. You even find a fanfiction for Secret Garden, a fake interview of yourself after you published a young-adult novel, and the beginnings of a fairy tale series you forgot about.
You go through a labelled high school folder full of old essays on Les Miserables, all versions from "JeanValjeanFinal" to "JeanValjeanFinalREALLYYES" to your diary entries for Nick Carraway for your American literature class. You make your way through that file and end up at your college years, going through each semester's rubrics, syllabi, and worksheets. You delete those and have painful, recent memories come to life, while congratulating yourself on your excellent scores from your anthropology class, and you feel a weight off of you as you clean it out, drag and drop.
The essays are windows into your self at that time of life. Your idealistic freshman year. Your weary junior year. Your speech on procrastination. Your speech on Michael Jackson's death. Your speech where you pretend to be Morgan Freeman. You keep those.
You've cleaned your computer up nicely. At least, you get rid of everything you can let go. There are files with single words on there that you have no idea what you planned to do with. There are files written for online comments. Those are gone now.
So you think, now, with a clear weight off your mind, you can sleep. Right? So maybe, three?
Please, at least three hours of sleep.
But the tossing happens and the weight comes back and sleep doesn't happen and your nose starts to leak from allergies. So you give up again. You turn on the light with itchy eyes and a swollen nose, and you find yourself cleaning your keyboard with Q-tips and tissues at three o'clock in the morning, because you would never do that in the day time.
And when you're done with that, satisfied with how shiny and clean your computer is, you still can't sleep, despite lying there with all of the lights off. You look at said shiny, clean computer right next to you, sniffling because your allergies are really cooking now, and you decide to go to your original plan of watching 30 Rock, because it's that hour of the morning when life thoughts start to creep in. What used to be a worry over sleepless hours becomes a worry over life goals and empty motivation and you start to develop a heart palpitation over the idea of going to your high school reunion, despite the fact that you just graduated college.
Whew. 30 Rock is there to fight off those mind demons. Focus on Liz Lemon. Focus on escapism. Numb the mind of your nasty thoughts as you try to trick it into sleeping.
But you realize that no, your stupid allergies are making your face leak constantly and your eyes are swollen, and you're already onto season three of 30 Rock and you don't know how you got that far. You also don't know when you've reached the bottom of the Kleenex box, but there your are.
Your life is as barren and as your hand scraping the naked cardboard of that stupid box of tissues, and you're faced with your mortality.
There is no way that you will sleep now.
On a side note, I did laundry today. I had a headache from lack of sleep, so I piled everything into the industrial dryer, propped the chair to the side, and leaned my head on it, reveling in the heat and wobble from the machine.