I'd intended to 'sleep over' tomorrow, with a change of clothes.

Those words are chained in quotes because, like my practice, I never really sleep when I do try to spend the night on a weekday.

You can tell me I don't have to worry about my car getting ticketed in an 8am-6pm parking space. You can say it's all psychological. But fear: it means shit, is shit, and does not give a shit. Fear is an ash grey simulacrum of you, staring at you, with yellow, incandescent eyes.

I am suffering. I am not to be pitied or want pity for saying that. I am stating a simple fact about my emotional state that I'd like to remember later.

I will inevitably get a few hours of sleep, awaken in a daze, and somehow shamble through the day in something approaching but not grasping efficiency.

It's just like when I was a teenager, when I was a younger 20-something, when I was now. Sleep burns like a hill of plastic on a beach, some noxious burnt offering to a rotating door of hollow ideas. In this case, I suffer because I'd like to be normal for Emily or appear that way once in a rare while.

But I'm not going to stop being afraid of my car, or not getting enough sleep, not when both have been fucked up in the past.

It's not going to change. My sleep problems only get worse with age. And inevitably perhaps it could hasten death.

Death. That is something I've been thinking about recently, idly passing over my hands like a rounded paperweight. Everyone does, I just do so more often it seems. I think about death because living is difficult. Of course, living is difficult for nearly everyone. We make it a sport in many cases to one-up each other on how completely fucked we happen to be at any one given time. It's fun. It makes us feel better. But still, inevitably, because absolutely nothing just falls into your lap without some extended effort to make or keep whatever it is, life often boils down to hopefulness for a better time, for less suffering. That does not occur, however, and the cycle of self-deception repeats itself.

I am terrified of death, of course. I am no more likely to kill myself than sever my genitals with a butcher's knife. Regardless, sometimes, more than less or less than more, it seems like it would be a pleasant alternative. I suppose sleep or coma are about the closest behaviors we have that come to that compromise.

I would like this compromise right now very much.

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