It was in a friend’s dorm room, where five or six of you were lying piled on a bed, watching South Park. After class, you went back to your dorm and offered to teach it to the boy you had a crush on, just so you would have an excuse to touch him.įrom there, it’s just a hop, skip and a jump to the memory of how you told him that you were in love with him. And as you’re doing this, you remember how, another time, in another theatre class, you learned to do a sort of bastardized version of the Alexander Technique. You count down how many hours are left until you have to get up.Īnd your brain says, Let’s read Sylvia Plath’s journals.Īnd your brain says, Let’s make a list of all of your shortcomings.īut you’re smarter than that, aren’t you? So instead, you do this relaxation exercise that you learned years ago in some theatre class that you took, where you bring some kind of mindful awareness (what does that even mean?) to each of your body parts in turn, starting from your toes all the way to the crown of the head. But now you’re cold, so you put on a sweatshirt and a pair of socks. Frustrated, you strip the sheets and blanket off the bed and throw them into a pile on the floor. Your legs get tangled up in the blanket, and the sheets feel wrong and scratchy. You squirm around, trying to find that elusive perfect spot on the pillow, the one that’s smooth and cool to the touch. You try to stay very still and think about nothing, but since when does thinking about nothing ever work? And while we’re at it, how does sleep work? How does everyone make the daily transition from conscious and thinking and feeling to, well, unconsciousness? Or else it gives you just the beginnings of sentences, stuff like: Or else it takes one small event from the day and expands it, blows it up like a grainy old photograph, then picks it apart. Instead, it offers you bits and pieces of information, things that are useless on their own but suggestive of something deeper, more frightening. You lie down, wriggle yourself into position, and close your eyes. You place your glasses and phone and kleenex on the night table and turn off the light. You start by carefully arranging everything on the bed: the long skinny pillow on one side, the regular pillow at the top, the pretty handmade blanket folded just so.
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