When my eyelids get heavy, and my head droops like an under-watered flower, all I want to do is snuggle with someone and take a nap. This usually winds up with me alone in my dorm room in the middle of the day, with the curtains drawn, cradling an oversized teddy bear—taking a nap.
Sometimes my brain shuts off, totally and completely, and my hands spend maybe an hour hunting through stands of my hair for split ends. They work in tandem with my glassy eyes to purge my head of the deformities.
When I am tired, I shamble around and drag my feet. I forget things, like what I was doing a minute or so before. My eyelids are half-closed and I look like I’m high. I’m not though, I promise, that’s just how I get sometimes. Not‘high’, just ‘loopy’.
I yawn a lot too—big, satisfying yawns that make my eyes water. On the school bus in high school, which I got up at 5:30 for, I would work up enough good yawns so that a tear or two would leak out.
In between yawns, I’d close my eyes, and my neck muscles would stop working. My head would fall, maybe an inch, but enough to jolt me to my senses, if only for a bit. This phenomenon also occurred during classes, most prominently during math classes. Not even Mr. Merritt, young, funny, and handsome, who worked a side job as a fitness coach, could keep me awake all the time. Pre-Calc, though, was the absolute worst. That teacher was as nice as they come, but desperately boring. It was in that class that one of my friends took pity on me and let me know that when my head was down on my desk—even though I was actually listening—my eyelids would flutter and make it look like I was having some sort of seizure. I would try to listen, and then I’d find myself racing along in some half-awake dream land.
Sometimes, when I’m reading, I fall asleep. I don’t do it on purpose, but when it’s an AP Economics textbook, I just can’t help it. Somewhere, at my old school, some unfortunate kid is reading out of a book that I’ve used as a pillow—and also drooled on. I try to prop my head up with my hand, but after a while that hurts my wrist, so I lay on my stomach with the book propped up in front of me, and that hurts my chin—I roll over and try hold the book over my head, and that doesn’t last long. So, finally, I lay my head on the book itself, read the page opposite my “pillow”, and by that point falling asleep is inevitable.
So is drooling—it’s a fact of having to breathe through your mouth which, incidentally, produces drool.
Being genuinely deprived of sleep with an essay to write, a recent addition to my adventures in sleeplessness, is miserable—especially when your attention span has dwindled down to roughly that of an excitable Chihuahua. My eyes burn and skitter around the computer screen, soaking in the unhealthy glow. Then, I convince myself that I should watch an old episode of The Twilight Zone, because that’s how my brain recharges itself. After all, I can only focus for forty-five minutes—it’s science or something. I try to finish off the essay with something intelligent, like a snappy concluding sentence:
That approach to writing sounds kind of lame for a Writing major, but I’ve done it more than once, in The Twilight Zone.
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