Someday I will die. The engine of cold malice and spite that has driven me so far will sputter and stop, and halfway through explaining to a hapless student why I burned their essay, my eyes will flutter, my mouth will snap shut, and my already cold body will crumple and get even colder.
At the funeral, whatever family I haven’t ostracized with my relentless weirdness will sit, somber in a room sniffling, or at least pretending to. Anywhere from 1 to 3 of my friends will be in attendance. There will be more cats than people, and my casket will be lined with green silk and my head resting on a pillow stuffed with shredded gradebooks so that I might take my work beyond with me.
Someone will speak, probably at a podium. My life will be summarized in a brisk minute-long speech which will leave members in the room switching between nodding happily and shaking their heads somberly. Per my orders, each person in attendance will snip off a curl of my hair to plant it in a landfill and routinely water it with water from the dead sea, as these are the conditions in which a new generation of me might come into existence.
Four days after my funeral, I will be comfortably resting in the ground when, somehow, deep underground, in a sealed box just for me, my cat will paw at my face to let me know she’s hungry. And then I’ll wake up screaming. I’ll check the time, realize how late I slept, dig my way out of the ground with my hands and teeth for tools, emerge like an undead plague upon the Earth, and then start running to campus.
It is only once I have shaken most the dirt from my hair and slowed my heartbeat down to its natural sluggish pace that I will have enough of my wits about me to wonder why nobody else is on campus.
And then I’ll realize that I didn’t oversleep. I was dead. There was no reason to panic. I don’t work today. Nobody learns anything on a Sunday, especially not from me.
I love sleeping in, but I’ll fucking never get used to it, and I’m never going to wake up and not think I’ve accidentally missed every important thing I’ve ever needed to do.
Sometimes when the day calls it’s ok to let it ring through to answerphone. 🙂
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I like the sound of that
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THAT was quite the read. Super stuff 😉
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Thank you!
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I feel you on a visceral level. I’m so terrified I’m gonna sleep through what I need to do, I rarely get to sleep… and when I do, like tonight, I dream of my parents coming to my house to wake me up because I slept through my alarm and my boss has called them.
Fun times. 🙂
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Yeah, there was a long time when I had to tape my phone to a table across the room because sleepy me would walk across the room, turn the alarm off, and fall back asleep unless there was a significant obstacle.
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I too must booby trap my room. I wish in waking I was as graceful as my unconscious mind can make me.
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I kind of want to set up a camera and record my sleepy stumbling through obstacles. I see a gameshow in our future
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I slept through an exam once. It was a nightmare. But probably better than waking up dead.
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I’ve slept through work and a few classes, and in the moment death definitely seemed preferable
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Just wait until you get old like me and suddenly lose your physical ability to sleep in. It’s real, it’s awful, and it’s coming for you.
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I’ve begun to lose it, but I will mourn it once it’s fully gone. Right now I mostly don’t sleep in because my cat is the earliest riser and I’m used to only sleeping in like 3 hour bursts because grad school can simulates all the symptoms of a painful death
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