The thing about insomnia is, your time isn't even time anymore. Even though you get the same ration of hours, or even a couple extra, they're an inflated foreign currency: you can't buy nothing worth shit with them.
I always drift into it, in cycles. I'll have a good week, waking and sleeping like a model citizen, Ben Franklin style. Up at six, bed by nine. It's funny, waking up with the morning light, it really is perky.
Especially if you have nothing to do.
But then time slides. You have a good book in hand, and even though you're sleepy, the pages are delicious. And the sleepiness is delicious too, a rich undiscovered indulgence. The desirability of sleep is just a notion, an intangible goal, real but never really available to be enjoyed; it's like national greatness or something. Sleep, that's only an undiscovered country. But sleepiness: now that's pleasure, a sweet decadence. Like dancing, fucking, getting high. Like an elixir poured on your eyelids and left to flow, a shooting quicksilver, deep into the eddies of your brain.
And so it goes. A few nights suffice before I'm up to three am. I can hold that pattern for a couple of weeks, but then inevitably 3 turns to 4, and before long there's that same perky morning light creeping up behind the blinds, an accusing, punitive mist of grey. A stern greybeard Apollo glaring in judgment. Probably it's Jehovah, in fact. Old bastard. Then I'll be up till noon.
Soon enough. But for now, I'm still konking out by 3. Not for long though, I have too little to keep me occupied.
****
I'm a creative writing student. I'm the kooky chick. I don't like my school, or this town. I came here to get away. At a sufficient distance my parents won't bother to nose around. The electronic tether isn't too tight: texting is an alien concept to mom, let alone the language of it. As for my father, language itself is an alien concept to him.
I have money to blow. I'm not ashamed of it. Not obscenely rich, but I can be self-indulgent. It's an attitude as well as a fact. Maybe it's the attitude that's poisonous, but the attitude is the part I'm least ashamed of.
Did I say 'creative writing'? Well, maybe that's getting ahead of myself. Maybe it's just an English major. I'm second year. I love literature but I don't get the whole 'English' thing anyway. I have no intention of ever reading Beowulf again, least of all from a scholarly perspective. They don't like to mention the stupid thing was unearthed like in the 1930s, so it had zero influence on actual British Literature. Or that that Old English shit is a completely different language. They'll sit around in the 400-levels chanting that Germanic shit or that Middle English Chaucer crap like a bunch of fucking hobbits, like they know something. Why don't they just learn French or Latin? Those are real languages, with real books written in them.
Seriously, why don't they just have a fucking Department of Literature? Nobody wants to major in Grammar and the Song of Roland. Besides, all they talk about is post-post-feminist politics and the Third World anyway. It's all Social Science for Retards.
****
I look at myself in the mirror. Do I like what I see?
Oddly, yes. It's sickening to admit, but sometimes I'm a bit entranced with myself. It's ridiculous, no one else is. I'm a solipsist, yes. But why not? Is anyone else falling over their heels to love me?
I'm a bit of a fatty. I'm too short, I suppose. But I really do love the face I have. It's round, white, soft. I wear heavy glasses, I have little piggy eyes, like Sandy Stranger. It's a 19th Century face, Victorian at its core; not the kind of perky, fake, plastic, tan face the world wants you to wear today, a face so frozen and fake it's not even capable of a sneer, let alone a sincere smile.
And you think I'm hateful, but really, I know how to smile. I'd like to, for somebody.
I say mine's a Victorian face: but post-modern too. I've got a labret piercing, the smooth round ball setting my mouth off like an exclamation point, neat, steely, decisive. And a pierced eyebrow, a steel banana bell in my right brow, to set off my sarcastic little eyebrow-arching fits just so. I'm very happy with them.
Maybe it sets other people off, so what? Nobody complains to my face, at least with the parents at a distance. If you ask me why I have my piercings, I won't tell you the truth-- that I actually think they're pretty.
I just won't tell you anything at all.
Besides, Katy likes them. They singled me out to her, she says. "Emily, you're--funky!" she told me when we met, doing some silly clubster gesture with her hands.
She thinks I should get more.
****
My earliest class is half past noon. I had a morning Comp class, but I complained to the professor I was bored and out of their league. Kind of a high school-issue gripe, I know, but he asked me if I'd like to move into the Contemporary American Lit class instead. A 312, pretty steep learning curve for a sophomore? Blow me, please.
I sat in the back, disaffected. They were reading stuff like Philip Roth, Joyce Carol Oates, some Southern writers of something. I sat behind this guy, I'd seen him around. David was his name. Sort of the Tourette's case of the English department. He'd mouth off, I heard, in his classes, piss off all the Adult Learners who were blowing their scrimped-up savings trying to Better Themselves Professionally taking classes or something. I figured I'd either hate him or like him. I spent my first day in the class drilling into the back of his head with my eyes, willing him to turn around and stare at me. Nothing doing.
Next time in class I sat in front of him. It's college, they're pretty laissez faire about that. Plus this school has a hard time filling the desks anyway. I had my hair back in a bun, putting my barcode tattoo on the nape of my neck on easy display, and the helix ring in the back of my ear. I slung my black backpack, with its mantle of pink anarchy buttons and dead Hello Kittys on the floor behind me, up against the side of his desk, making him feel trapped and possessed, I hoped. Trapped by me.
I touched the sides of my head a lot during class. When we were dismissed, I turned around and asked David, "Read much Kundera?"
I had tried out all sorts of openings in my head and this one appealed to me somehow. I had tried reading "Immortality" and I hated it.
He blushed, flustered. I like it that he was easy to fluster, but I had pinned my chances on the idea that his ego and his curiosity wouldn't let him dismiss such a precise, taunting little question.
"Uhm, what kind of question is that?" he said finally.
Shit. I wanted to ask if he wasn't the type, but would he like it if I were ascribing him to a type already? No, no. I just repeated, firmly, "Well, do you or don't you?"
"Read much Kundera?"
"Yes," I said, smiling. I really liked this.
"What if I only read a little?"
"How much is 'a little'?"
"Well, actually I don't read him at all," he admitted. I knew in his heart he really meant this as a dismissal of Kundera, but I took it as a good sign that he wasn't outwardly dismissing me for asking the question.
