You’re so tired. You just woke up. Your body aches and your eyes burn. You’ve been asleep for eleven hours. You’re so tired.
You might not have cataplexy. You might not have it yet. It might not be noticeable. It might not be noticeable yet.
You sleep with your head under the blankets and you wake up unable to move. Something in your bedroom is moving. Someone is calling your name. You cannot move. There is no one else home. You cannot move.
Every few weeks you start your research over, because every few weeks, so does medical science. Studies suggest everything and every study suggests the last is wrong.
Are you dreaming? Count your fingers.
You can’t sleep. It feels like a punchline. Television characters with your diagnosis slapped on like a summary drop their heads onto tables, stand still and start snoring in the street. Your bed is always too much softness or not enough warmth, too many blankets, not enough noise. Your exhaustion builds itself up and up and up until it towers over even primal fears, and you nap in the bathtub.
You had your sleep study. They monitored your brain, explained your results, told you exactly what your body was doing. You still stagger to the kitchen at two in the morning and think they must have got it wrong. You must just be lazy. You must just be tired.
You swallow half a pill meant to boost your energy and you don’t sleep for two days. Colors are brighter and sounds pool and congeal. You are so alive, so alive, you can do anything, your back hurts, your head spins and you want to cry. You can do anything.
You’re afraid to cook. You’re afraid of the stove. You’re afraid of the oven. You’re afraid of your brain and your body. You’re not afraid of the bathtub, not anymore. You sleep more easily with your head above water than under blankets.
Are you dreaming? Look in a mirror.
You drink the kind of drug that comes with legal notices and a syringe. It pulls you under, under, under, until you’re dizzy and giddy and terrified, until you aren’t anything, until you roll over and stare at the clock and wonder where three hours have gone. You take it again and it presses you into the mattress, there is a weight on your back, your jaw aches against the pillow and your knees and elbows are screaming. You can’t feel your hands.
You take it again the next night. You will take it again the next night for the rest of your life. It is terrifying, and dangerous, and the best thing that has ever happened to you. You call to ask about side effects, and you are informed that your comments will be reported to the people who are still being paid to study them.
The pharmacy and the doctor and the insurance company make separate, contradictory promises. Some of them come true. You stop spending money and you check your bank account twice a day.
You sleep with your phone in your hand and you wake up unable to move. An alarm is blaring, has been blaring; you don’t remember falling asleep. You cannot move. The last vestiges of an impossible scenario are clinging to your brain and your body, and you wrench away from it all and you wrench your hands up to your face. You stare at the snooze button on your touchscreen until the letters make sense.
You don’t remember what you did yesterday, or what you planned to do today. You have 26 texts and an unanswered email, but you don’t remember how to form sentences. The drug is supposed to make you “productive,” make you “functional,” help you find a job. You took a shower standing up yesterday and almost cried.
Time passes more quickly than you’re prepared for. It’s already been a week. It’s always already been a week.
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