Entry Four
I used to be a person who slept.
That’s the part I keep coming back to, because everything else makes sense if you start there. I slept. I was sixteen and I went to school and I did homework at the kitchen table and I slept eight hours a night like it was nothing, like it was air. I didn’t know it was a gift. Nobody tells you. You just wake up one morning and the gift is gone and you don’t know where it went.
It started in the spring. Not all at once. Sleep didn’t break; it eroded. First I couldn’t fall asleep before one. Then two. Then I’d lie there until the sky went gray and get up for school feeling like I’d been awake for days, because I had been, almost.
The anxiety came with it, or maybe it was there first. It’s hard to say which one invited the other. Anxiety pressed up through my ribs like steam. My chest felt over-occupied, like there was something in there taking up more room than it was supposed to. At school I’d sit in third period and feel my heart going too fast for no reason, and I’d put my hand under the desk and press it against my ribs to make sure it was still in there, still mine. The teacher’s voice would go flat and far away, like she was talking from the end of a hallway. I’d copy notes I couldn’t read later. My handwriting slanted downhill. Once, in the cafeteria, the noise of it — trays, voices, chairs scraping — rose up all at once like a wave, and I had to go stand in the bathroom with my hands over my ears until it passed. Nobody asked. Or everybody noticed and nobody said anything. Teenagers are tired. Teenagers are anxious. It’s practically the uniform.
Mom noticed a little. She’d knock on my door at midnight and find me awake, reading, or not reading, just sitting there, and she’d stand in the doorway with that look. “You okay, sweetheart?” And I’d say, “Yeah, just can’t sleep.” And she’d say, “Warm milk?” like it was a joke and not a joke. I’d laugh. She’d close the door. We both knew warm milk wasn’t going to fix it.
Dad didn’t say much. That’s his way. He’d put his hand on my forehead when he passed me in the hallway — cool, heavy, like metal — checking for a fever I didn’t have. “You look tired,” he’d say. That was his whole vocabulary for worry. You look tired.
I was tired. I was so tired I could feel it in my teeth.
The nights got longer. That’s the thing nobody tells you about insomnia: the night is enormous when you’re the only one awake in it. The apartment made sounds I hadn’t known it made. The fridge humming. The pipes ticking as they cooled. The building settling, old wood shifting, a long slow creak like something turning over in its sleep. Everybody else was asleep. The whole world was asleep except me.
I tried everything the internet said. No screens after ten. I lay in the dark and stared at the ceiling and listened to my own breathing and thought about breathing, which is the fastest way to forget how to do it naturally. Chamomile tea. It tasted like hot flowers and did nothing. Melatonin, three milligrams, from the drugstore. It gave me vivid dreams about drowning and woke me up at four with my heart hammering.
I started doing homework at two in the morning just to have something to do with the hours. I’d sit at the kitchen table with the lamp on, and the apartment would be so quiet I could hear the hum of the lamp itself, a thin electric whine at the edge of hearing. I’d do algebra and the numbers would swim. I’d read the same paragraph four times.
And then one night — it was a Tuesday, I remember because I had a history test the next day that I was going to fail from sheer exhaustion — I was in the bathroom at 2 AM, splashing water on my face, trying to shock myself into either sleeping or giving up, and I opened the medicine cabinet.
I wasn’t looking for anything. That’s important. I wasn’t looking.
The cabinet was Mom’s domain. Neat rows. Bandages. Antibiotic ointment. A thermometer. Cough syrup, the red kind, from when I was twelve. And there, on the second shelf, pushed to the back behind the cotton balls: a box. Pink and white. Allergy pills. Diphenhydramine. Twenty-five milligrams each. The label said: May cause drowsiness.
May cause drowsiness.
I stood there with the cabinet door open and the bathroom light too bright and my face wet, and I read those three words over and over. May cause drowsiness. It was the most beautiful sentence I’d ever read. It was a promise. It was permission.
I took the box back to my room. I sat on the bed with it in my lap. I read the whole label, front and back, the way you read a contract you’re about to sign. Adults take one or two. Every four to six hours. Do not exceed. Do not operate heavy machinery. I wasn’t planning to operate heavy machinery. I was planning to sleep.
My hands shook a little. Not from fear, exactly. From tiredness. From the sheer weight of being awake for the fortieth night in a row. I remember thinking: this is such a small thing. Four little pills. People take these for hay fever. People take these on airplanes.
I took four. That seemed reasonable. Twice the dose, half the caution. I swallowed them dry, one at a time, and lay back on the pillows and waited.
Nothing happened for twenty minutes. I almost got up. I almost put the box back and told myself it was a stupid idea.
And then — the edges went soft.
It wasn’t dramatic. Nobody’s first time is dramatic, whatever the forums say later. My limbs got heavy, the good kind of heavy, like someone laying a warm blanket over me one fold at a time. The steam in my ribs thinned out. The ceiling stopped being interesting. My thoughts, which had been racing in tight frantic circles for months, slowed down and spread out and went quiet, one by one, like lights going off in a house.
I slept. I actually slept. Seven hours, straight through, no dreams I could remember. I woke up to my alarm feeling groggy and thick-tongued and wonderful. Wonderful. I sat on the edge of the bed and laughed out loud, alone in my room, because it had worked. It had actually worked.
That was the first handful. Four pink pills. Not to die. Just to sleep.
I told myself it was temporary. Just until the insomnia passed. Just until school let up. Just until whatever was wrong with my brain fixed itself. I put the box back in the cabinet, behind the cotton balls, exactly where I’d found it. Mom never noticed it had moved. Why would she.
The second time was three nights later. Six pills. The third time, eight. It was so easy. It was the easiest thing in the world. The pills were just there, in the cabinet, pink and white and legal and cheap, and they did exactly what they said they’d do. May cause drowsiness. They caused it. They caused it beautifully.
I started keeping count in my head. Not writing it down — I wasn’t writing anything down yet, the diary came later — just keeping a quiet tally. How many. How often. How deep the sleep went. It felt scientific. It felt controlled.
The grogginess in the mornings got worse. Dry mouth like I’d been chewing cotton. A strange thickness behind my eyes that didn’t clear until noon. But I was sleeping, and sleeping was worth anything. Sleeping was worth everything.
And then one night — maybe the tenth time, maybe the twelfth, I don’t remember exactly, the tally got fuzzy around then — I was lying in bed waiting for the heaviness to come, and I heard it.
A whisper. Very faint. From inside my own head, or from the walls, or from the pills themselves dissolving in my stomach. I couldn’t tell. It didn’t matter.
It said: Take a few more.
I sat up. The room was dark. The apartment was quiet. The fridge hummed. My heart was going too fast, but that was just the anxiety, just the old familiar steam in the ribs.
Go on, the whisper said. What’s a few more? You want it quieter, don’t you?
I lay back down. I told myself I’d imagined it. Lack of sleep does that — even the internet said so. Auditory things. Normal. Harmless.
But I didn’t sleep that night. Not really. I lay there in the dark with the heaviness all around me and the whisper underneath it, patient, unhurried, and I understood, with a clarity that scared me more than the whisper itself, that something had started.
The pink ones had talked first. And I had listened.
