Mirror Reflection

I was walking to my car on my lunch break, and passed by a mirrored window. I did a double take, as I didn’t recognize the person looking back at me.

Surprisingly, my hair looked good, courtesy of a blowout yesterday at the salon. But where did the dark circles under my eyes come from? And the red blotches on my face?

I haven’t been sleeping through the night, and what little sleep I do get is not restful. I have these weird dreams almost every night. Weird-like-on-vicodin-weird. I thought I wasn’t going to bed early enough, but I’ve made it a point to go to bed by 11 nearly every night this week. I unplug my laptop, no drinks after 7, and only take relaxing books to bed, but no use.

I think the culprit may be K.

The study is directly off the bedroom and K’s under deadlines right now, so he stays up late working. He pulls the pocket door closed and uses headphones, but I still struggle to fall asleep and when he comes to bed I always wake up.

We’ve tried a couple of things to help my sleeping, but none of them seem to be working. I’m such a light sleeper, just about anything wakes me up. The lack of sleep gets progressively worse as the week goes by, and by today, Thursday, I’m a walking zombie. And then I think about how our time together is so limited. . . .and I guess I’ll go on being a walking zombie, with great hair.

But it also makes me wonder (silently, to myself) when did I get so old? In undergrad, I could function on 3 hours of sleep for days at a time, and unlike my roommate Barb, I was not in the middle of a manic episode. I remember helping my mom open her bakery at 4am, working at the bakery, then going to my part-time job, then going to class, then going to hang out or study then going drinking, then sleeping a few hours and doing it all over again. Hmmm. . . maybe I was in the middle of a manic episode.