✅ My Sister's Problem

7. Early

I woke up quickly, feeling refreshed. A few seconds passed, lying there with my eyes still closed, before I realised why I was feeling quite so comfortable today. The last two or three mornings I had been startled awake by an alarm, but now I had silence, and this was infinitely better. I couldn't be sure how much of my comfort was because of the lack of electronic screeching, and how much was because I was more relaxed. But I decided that this was pretty good evidence that having something in my mouth might be a source of calm.

Yes, I was sucking on the pacifier. I'd been curious about how it would make me feel if someone treated me like a baby; but for now treating myself like a kid was the closest I could get. It felt kind of comforting, like I was pretending to be a kid who didn't have to worry about standardised tests at the end of the year, and just pretending might help me get into thinking like that. Or maybe it was the simple repetitive action of sucking that gave a rhythm to my breathing. Maybe that made me sleep better, and feel more relaxed. Either way, I thought I could call that experiment a success.

I felt vibration from my wrist again, a faint but insistent tingle. I had to get up, I knew. That was why I didn't hear the harsh buzz of an alarm. A delivery had arrived after dinner, with the new SVX-3 that I had spent the last of my birthday money and two months of allowance on. I'd had to go back to an audible alarm for a few days while I'd been waiting for the new smart watch, and I had regretted that. It wasn't just the difference between sound and vibration. My first one had been top of the range when I'd got it; and this new one was a generation later. Instead of setting a time for my alarm to wake me in the morning, I would give it a range of half an hour. It would measure my sleep, tracking my pulse and other measurements to identify if I was in alpha, beta, or theta sleep; and it would pick the best time to vibrate so that I was neither startled nor too deep to notice. It was amazing how fancy tech had gotten in the last couple of years.

Fully rested, I opened my eyes. I shook my wrist to make the watch light up with the time. Just after two in the morning; that would explain why it was still dark, and there were no faint sounds of Mum starting to prepare breakfast and get everything ready for the day ahead. I didn't need to be awake now, really. I certainly didn't need to be up for school. But I felt pretty rested, so I could afford to spend a few minutes awake before I returned to bed. I glanced towards the curtain that separated my room from my sister's.

Did I need to torment her? I'd already found out that a pacifier seemed to help me calm down after a long day, and maybe helped me to sleep. Surely that should be all the proof I needed. But the voice in my head said no: if one childish thing helped me to relax, would others? It just made me more curious, more interested to discover if I would be comfortable wearing a pull-up again. I had no intention of using them, I just wanted to know if wearing one would feel right in the same way the paci did. Comfortable and safe, like I'd presumably felt when I was a kid. But if it helped in the same way, I needed to know about it. Even if it wasn't something I could carry on doing, I wanted to know. And the only way I would get the chance...

I picked up my phone, and called up my sleep states graph. Pulse and temperature, and coloured blocks on a chart to indicate sleep depth. I tapped the settings button in the corner, and then 'devices'. It gave me a choice of two watches, imaginatively named 'Sallys SVX2 Pro', and 'Sallys new SVX-3'. I picked the old one again, and it told me that I was in a theta state – the deepest phase of sleep – and that there were hours of rest left before my alarm window. That was good; I wouldn't want to accidentally wake myself if I made a little noise.

I put my phone down on the bookcase closest to the curtain, and found a playlist that I'd created earlier. White noise could make it harder for the sleeping brain to register unexpected sounds, at least according to the experts of the Internet. I had a couple of audio files, but the one I'd found was titled '90 minite loop will garantee make you pee'. It was a dumb title for a file that was just the audio of a flowing stream behind various short video clips of toilets flushing, waterfalls, and water being poured into glasses. There was supposed to be some lame challenge like betting if you can watch the whole thing without a bathroom break. I'd actually just been looking for audio loops of quiet nature background sounds with a lot of white noise, but when I'd seen that one I thought it had to be some kind of omen. I was ignoring the title and treating it like a sound file of a flowing river, but that caption seemed oddly appropriate, given what I was using the white noise for. I had no idea if anyone really felt like they needed to go when they heard water, but I was sure it would be a good choice to hide the sound of me filling the bowl.