Sleep Walking

She  did not sleep last night apart from a series of short, restless sweats from which she emerged alert and twitching. Thoughts seeped from sleep to waking in a borderless tirade. “You said the wrong thing!” “They don’t like you!” “You are conversationally tone deaf!”  There is no money - not even the money you thought you saved. You haven’t. You can’t. You didn’t.   You never do.

Pacing doesn’t help. Not really.  And the people at work, they neither like nor dislike her - they hold her in a form of suspended disregard.  Except that’s not true, which means she doesn’t know what’s true, which means she can’t  figure out how to navigate  humans.  And she can’t explain why she took comfort in her mother’s indignation about the tight-rope walker who crossed Niagara Falls the other day trailing a small wheeled wire..  Wellenda - or  something like that.

“Yeah, I saw it,” Her mother said.  “The strap was a problem.”  “Even though it didn’t make it easier for him to do, technically - well, we’re blood-thirsty.  We wanted him to fall and slap the water like a salmon and flip over the falls and die if he didn’t succeed, and we knew, because of that little strap, that it wouldn’t happen.”

That she feels like the salmon half the time and the tight rope walker the other half as she navigates her large-housed, healthy child-ed existence is comical, but only on Friday evenings. During most other times, it is a battle she engages in a petulant slump, like the smoker outside her office building standing shame facedly in the rain, about to quit, going to quit.  Maybe if a cigarette poked out between her lips every time she fretted and freaked she’d somehow make herself stop.  Maybe shame would work.  Or maybe she’d just wear it.

The morning after a sleepless night comes too slowly and suddenly, like death after a long illness. She wakes up angry. She glares at her fellow commuters and hates them in a cheerfully free-wheeling way.  It’s not personal. She hates them all. Their breathing. Their confidence. Their nonchalance. Their backpacks and stutter-steps and apologies.

Tomorrow, she will love them for these things. For the way they are willing to breathe in the thick outside air and lunge toward the windows like hot puppies, the way they throw their shoulders back as they head downtown, bracing for the familiar tirades and muddy waters of a business puddle fight, the way they carry ruddy back packs over pressed suits and apologize for everything - their elbows, their shoulders, their feet.

Tomorrow, she will love them again, because they will be humanity, and she will be the writer.  Today, she is merely among them, and she is she and they are she and she is not okay.

But tomorrow. Just wait, tomorrow, she will be different. Even if they can’t see it.