Sleep

I'm in the majority here when I say I love sleeping. Most people love slipping in between the sheets for a snooze. I'm certainly a champion of the nap. I love to close my eyes, cuddle my cat and waltz somewhat loudly -- thanks to all the purring -- right into Slumbersville.

Sleeping is sort of a problem for me. I somehow don't do it enough and also overdo it at the same time. I used to be a night owl. I wouldn't fall asleep till 3am most nights. I used to pull all nighters in college, turn in incoherent papers and zombie my way over to the cafeteria for breakfast. On those mornings, I felt like I was walking on clouds -- unsteady and ready to crash down to earth with a gigantic bang. But I always made it to bed before I crashed despite how comfortable a park bench or a sunny patch of grass looked at the time.

Then came my real life. The life that consisted of actually having to wake up before noon because I had a place to be that would fire me if I didn't show up. Napping was a thing of the past. Napping was something I thought about longingly during the workday. When I got home, I took a shower, ate dinner and maybe watched TV before it was time to go to sleep to start the same old cycle over again.

I'm not really sure I'm a night person, but I was convinced I was not a morning person. I was a sleep person. Those cushy pillows and snuggly blankets held me together like a hug. It was hard to let go in the mornings and when I finally did, it was with a whimper. I liked the morning routine. Eat cereal, feed my cat and catch up on the internet. It was the getting ready for work part that I didn't find so fantastic. I loved those long, lingering mornings, when I had nowhere to be and brunch was had and my husband (boyfriend at the time) would watch movies together. Or even those days, when we'd get up early to run errands and happily return home before noon and have the entire day ahead of us.

Work was such a chore. And the thing with work was that I could never check it off my list. It was always there every single day and one Saturday a month. It was stealing my sleep and my mornings and even those after midnight minutes were lost to it. My entire routine was decided by my job. I had no choice in the matter.

It's not that I minded being there. I left the house. I rode the train. It was somehow romantic. I made it that way. But when I was at work, I daydreamed about being anywhere else. Elegant castles. Horseback riding. Taming tigers. Or even teaching a banana the alphabet. I had very little time to write while I was working, since I had to work with my hands at  ridiculous and inhuman speeds. So in my head, I wrote haiku, short stories and pretty much anything that would fit on those mini post-it notes. Incoherent scribbles that  mean nothing to me now.

But now, I'm jobless. And when I close my eyes at night, those daydreams are night dreams and sleeping isn't much as an escape as a playground. And when I wake up, I write.

I write about princes, cats and about toothbrushes falling in love. The good dreams. The night dreams. The daydreams becoming real life dreams.