I sleep like shit. It's entirely plausible that I have sleep apnea. I clock in 4 to 5 hours a night, with a rough ascent into wakefulness. I somehow manage, though. I feel like garbage, sure, but I've demonstrated that I have a serious capacity to push through, with or without caffeine. Although, that's not to say I don't end up feeling it.
Today, I got 2 hours of sleep. 5 hours is the bare minimum amount I need to sleep before wakefulness is debilitated into being this hazy, heavy delirium, where your body feels like crumbled up paper underwater, walking around it in feels as such, and real life feels completely subject to change like the disintegration of celluloid film.
I spent the night before hanging out with J-----, N-----, E---, Je--, R---, Ja--, and company, then studying four chapters for my Social and Cultural History of the English Language class assuming I had a quiz I never actually wound up having. My day was spent wandering around campus with E--- and/or Ja--, being led into random seminars or club meetings - of which there are several hundred occurring every day - in order to steal free food and dip before anything more formal started. Campus is overwhelmingly big. Once again, this is a place meant for 41,000 students. What you're traversing is a city within a city. Parkades, Faculty of Engineering lounges, undergrad math lounges, hundreds of nondescript lecture halls, sun roofs, government-funded research facilities, bus stations, a whole mall, the strange scent of piss, promotional ephemera, clashing masses of cobblestone and steel. The effect of all this while overcaffeinated and underslept is hallucinatory. It resembles places you got lost in in dreams you had as a teenager. I'm lucky to know people who technically work here to give me a proper lay of the land. I need to make sense of the mess of train intercoms, idle chatter, Tim's cashiers, and elevator dinging.
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Whenever I got in the sun, I'd close my eyes and face my whole body towards it, raising my hands outward. I'd do this for probably only a few seconds, but it was long enough for me to truly conceive what it would feel like to become nothing. I almost wanted it.
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There's this girl(?) I see on the LRT sometimes. I saw her when I got on the wrong train a few weeks ago. She was coming from Clareview while I was trying to go south to Century Park, the part of the route that has to cross the bridge over the river. I saw her sitting at the end of the car, besides the doors, looking down. She looks deceptively androgynous, wearing a sleeveless turtleneck, baggy cargo pants, combat boots, possibly a tote bag, or some kind of satchel. Kind of a muted Y2K thing going on. Obviously, I thought she was cute. I wondered if she noticed me, although a part of me hoped she didn't. I didn't want to watch her for too long, because, y'know, common decency. But she had that face looking out the window, the kind losers like me have to write about, or perhaps just want to write about, imposing our desires onto a face that could be looking at whatever. She got off at University Station, and I had to keep going. I wondered if I would see her again.
Today, I saw her again. This time, she was without turtleneck and more explicitly Y2K, leaving University Station with a bunch of people I thought I knew. I followed her because I also happened to be leaving University Station for McKernan-Belgravia while she was heading back to Clareview. We collected on either side of the platforms, our trains arriving at the exact same time; the sleeplessness wearing on me. I was listening to Wilco & Billy Bragg's "One by One," which synced up perfectly to us descending on the escalator, waiting for the trains, getting on them, and watching her face dissolve into glass and tunnel darkness as the song picked up. I was amazed at the whole scene, like, holy fuck - this is just like a movie, and I'm the guy. This has to be significant. This is too deliberately blocked for this not to mean anything. Here I am, a listless twentysomething trying to start over in a new city, intrigued by a girl with curious hair on the train. How cool is that?
Obviously, I teared up a bit, the whole situation being like the turn of a faucet to let a stream of repressed emotions blast out of me. I thought of J--- and listened to Bob Dylan. I thought of the time we were holding each other in their bed, and I told them that my ultimate ambition in life is to write a book that would forgive everyone I've ever loved for all the shit they carry every day, and they told me - and I'll never forget this - "I think I'll always love you." Every time I think of that, I start sobbing. It feels like I've stabbed in the chest, and I'm never going to stop bleeding. I tried to build up strength walking home after nearly a month of trying to bring myself down. I repeated to myself, "One foot in front of the other. One foot in front of the fucking other. One foot in front of the other." I've made a decision that I am going to care about myself in spite of everything. I have to. There is simply nothing else for me to do.
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E--- is probably smarter than me. His wit is off the charts. His command over rhetoric pounces on you like a fucking tiger. At the drop of a hat, he can pull up a couple month's worth of erudition and wildly reflexive critical thinking to blow the doors off your half-assed bullshit, whether you're talking about Kant or the thought that you'll never find love again. It can make him come across as an occasionally patronizing dick, and you hate him all the more for never being wrong. He rarely speaks on what he doesn't know much about, but it rarely seems to not know much about something. Talking with him can occasionally become torrential. Conversations order themselves as something between a lecture, a workshop, and a stroll. Seriously unserious, irreverently reverent. Nothing gets unexamined, and few things are left to linger. He gets it from his dad.
