2006-05-10 - 3:22 a.m.

My throat is sticky. Not dry, sticky. The walls draw towards each other with each breath, like two strips of duct tape perilously close together, blowing in the wind. Wet and dry and tacky all at once. Water doesn’t help. Warm water doesn’t help. I don’t want tea.

I have work in the morning. Almost certainly. I never know ahead of time- which is bad. I don’t like my job. I don’t like standing around, telling children to be quiet. I don’t like faking crossness, because I know if I do it enough, it’ll stop being fake. I don’t like not liking my job for seventy dollars a day. It’s not a hard job, but it’s not a good job. I don’t like that I haven’t been sleeping well in weeks.

Apnea scares me. I don’t worry that I’ll have a stroke in the middle of the night or anything like that. I don’t even worry so much about the slow scarring effect that it apparently has on my lungs. Will have. I worry most about the oxygen. The air I’m not breathing every now and then (probably a few hundred then-and-thens each night- that’s how it works), slowly eating away at my brain.

I worry about losing control of my life. Not individual decisions- at least not those as much. I worry about the sort of perverseness that seems to guide my decisions. Or rather, that seems to guide whatever slow logic brings me to my decisions. I often find I settle on things I was certain I’d never do, never want to do, and I don’t think that’s necessarily a good thing.

I can’t sleep. My pillow, then pillows, then pillow again are never in the right place. The blanket covering my feet is now constraining, sweltering. My hair falls strangely, and too much under my head. My arms, where do they go? These things were once effortless- now I just can’t find a place for them all. Weeks now.

I’m not sick anymore. I’m pretty happy. I can’t sleep.

-fader