No Sleep Till...

(This was an email, like The Daily Lupus instead of The Daily Rumpus or something, but only to one person and now I suppose it's to all of you.)

Good morning! Happy Spring Forward!

I'm excited about this but I haven't been able to sleep in days. Yesterday everyone was over for my niece's christening, 60 people nicely asking how I am. And I'm cranky (actually, I'm crangry, a word I invented that means cranky, angry and hungry), but I'm trying to be okay so I say "so tired" because I'm too tired to lie and say that I'm not, so everyone starts to tell me how my sleep patterns are JUST like a new parents. You know, the kid's up every couple hours to eat or cry or poop, which sucks, but I'm not a newborn baby, I'm not a parent, I'm just a 27 year old human being who has not slept more than an hour straight since Thursday morning. (Plus, I don't want a damn baby! And if I do, I'm getting a baby nurse because this. shit. is torture.)

Anyway. I know this accuracy of my sleep timing because I keep a sleep app open and it tells me these things. I'm not sure how much I believe in its' accuracy when it comes to measuring REM and that stuff–it's just an iPhone, and maybe it's just an iPhone and CAN do that, which is perhaps scarier–but what I do is hit the sound machine button when I'm going to sleep, and then swipe it when I wake up.

Right now I'm experimenting with different noises Sleep Cycle offers. The rain made me have to pee and so did the babbling brook. I went again with no noise. Then some white noise, brown noise, pink noise, no noise again, city noise...

I once lived over my favorite bar in the Bronx, in the neighborhood where I went to school. It was so loud, but I slept fine, probably because most of the time I was passing out from drinking too much at said bar. That was before I had cancer though, and although I've had lupus and Other Random Diseases since I was a baby, the cancer changed my body for the worse.

The loudest place I ever lived was that castle building in Hollywood/Los Feliz. At night the LAPD choppers would scream above me, and I always felt like an earthquake was coming, and I was excited and unprepared and already shaping the narrative of how I'd tell it: "So, I had no flashlight, and my iPhone battery was down to 88 percent...". The earthquake never came. I didn't sleep well there either.

But this is bad. This is hospital bad. Hospital bad is a different sort of bad because they wake you up every 2 hours to check vitals and there's always doctors and nurses and priests trying to save your soul streaming in and out. But I'm not in the hospital, and I wish I were, because at least then I'd have IV Dialudid (legal heroin, basically) shooting into my veins and I wouldn't be so fucking aware that I am awake. Also, they have cranberry juice there, and I could really go for some right now.

I'm rambling.

My eyes are crossing again which means it's time to close them again. I can keep them open for about 10 minutes, enough time to pee and tweet and complain. I can type when they start to cross, but only with one eye open. Reading is hard, I forget everything I've watched on TV, I keep re-reading recaps of the episodes of Scandal I've watched (all caught up!). I don't have the energy to watch last night's Girls but watching The Bachelor's okay because it's just a blur of molded flesh, tan against the blue background, the white snow.

I'm going to try and go back to sleep again. But my mouth is getting worse. And I'm taking oral pain meds and Advil PM and even half an Ambien but I'm awake, and it sucks. I'm sorry for complaining and not bothering to edit or reread this. You can correct my grammar and tell me to throw the iPad away or maybe give me a remedy. Just don't say guided meditation because at this point, my subconscious has visited every damn beach in the world with Bachelor Sean Lowe and yet here I am, wide awake (and it's morning).

I guess I have to say one more thing, and it's this: I wake up screaming "NO!" or with my head pressed into the pillow, my face scratching back and forth against the pillowcase as I try to stay asleep. I am screaming sometimes. Maybe I am an infant. Maybe this is all a bad dream...

OK. Back at it. Talk to you in an hour. Or maybe 18.

Love,
Kelly