a morning in the day of the life of me

I woke up at 7am again today. This has become a sort of ritual. I fall asleep somewhere around 3:30am, no matter what time I climbed into bed. I have a fitful night of dreaming, from frustrating to terrifying dreams. As soon as I have slept enough to not be completely knocked out by exhaustion, about 7am, I pop awake, head full of fitful thoughts and emotions. Usually I toss and turn, stretching and cracking various body parts, until about 9am. Sometimes a little before, sometimes a bit after. Then, at 10am, my alarm goes off. I turn it off, and roll over, just actually beginning to enjoy sleeping. 11am, my 2nd alarm goes off. I struggle enough to turn it off and attempt to wake up. Always a futile attempt. I groggily flop over every 10 minutes or so, trying to separate my still dreaming mind from waking reality, and to make my body parts work. As the clock nears 12, panic is the only force that makes my 1-ton limbs move and hop my body out of bed. I know if MUNI were simple and kind, as long as I headed out the door by 12:20, I will be to school in plenty of time. But I know better. I know between 11:30 and 1pm, there is often a 40+ minutes between buses on my first bus, let alone calculating problems with the bus I transfer to. So I throw on whatever clothes, give my teeth a cursory brush, throw my hair back in clips and elastics, and run out to the bus. My stomach grumbles. When I get to the school, I grab a dollar burrito off the roach coach and rush to class.

I then flow through my day in a fog. English is as a second language to me; pretty pictures and the occasional grunt my first. I am expected to participate in class, take tests, turn in comprehensible assignments. It is expected that when I go home, I will continue working assiduously on assignments. I drift. I have no concentration. Pages are a spattering mess of words. It's all I can do to string the words of the sentences I am reading to make comprehensible sentences in my mind. It's exhausting.

I can hardly keep myself awake. I don't want to take a nap, I have enough trouble getting to sleep. I put everything aside and tell myself, I won't work on this now. I will keep myself up and then go to bed at a decent hour. Tonight I will get a decent amount of sleep and tomorrow begin anew. Refreshed, I will wake in time to look at this in the morning and head off to the school early. I put myself in bed. Pop! The thoughts in my head have at me again. Anytime I am about to drift, they give me one more worry, one more misery, to help keep me up at night. I watch t.v. or play video games till the thoughts are sufficiently drowned out to allow my brain to drift drowsily again, and my eyelids are so heavy, I can not keep them open. Damn, it's almost 3:30am. Gotta get to sleep. I will turn off my 10am alarm so I can be sure to get 7 full hours of sleep. Yeah, that's a good idea. Then 7am....

This morning, there was no going back to sleep at about 9. After 9:30, I gave up. I have to be up before 11 today, and there is no use continuing to toss and turn just to squeeze in 20 minutes of restless sleep to then struggle for 30 minutes to get myself out of bed and be running late all over again. But I do wish, I wish I were asleep right now. I really, really wish I were asleep.

One of these days, I am going to need more than 4 hours of semi-consecutive sleep.