памятник

22:00:00

here we are. i have to go to sleep now, in this perfect window. if i get into bed before this time it will take me an hour at least, but most likely longer, to get to sleep. i will think about everything that has ever happened, or everything that has ever happened to me, and the background processes of my body and its organs will churn, slosh, and grind along beyond the edges of my dimmed awareness: i’ll get hungry, and i’ll have to get up.

at this time of year my bed is very, very cold. it might be a long, long night.

23:00:00

if it hasn’t happened yet, it won’t for a long time.

the received knowledge on insomnia is simple and stark: the bed is for sleeping. if i am in my bed for longer than fifteen minutes without falling under, i should get out of bed and do something elseeat a bowl of cereal, which for the past three months has been all that i have wanted to do at most hours of most days; but the received knowledge on having a healthy body is that you shouldn’t eat the same foods several times a day everyday, that it is shameful to eat in the dead of night if you are alone and sober.. i know, also, that i should not be aware of the time – and so by what means could i possibly know how long i have been failing to sleep? i have not noticed until just now that i wasn’t asleep.

i can only fall asleep in one position, too. on my stomach, my body tilted left, my left leg crooked up (think: car crash victim). i have acne overwhelmingly on the side of my face that i sleep and nightly and daily i wash my face but it does not help. everyone who wants to sell me a cervical support pillow tells me that this is the worst possible position to sleep in. i know it is, because i give myself bodily aches and pains beyond my years doing it. after this i spend the whole day with my shoulders hunched.

i'm sorry. i'm sick of this, too. i am not in the business of needless selfmade misery – this pain is not artful, and so it means very little to me and i am even embarrassed to talk about it.

believe me: it has always, always been my dream to sleep on my back. if i could sleep on my back, i would sleep wholly and deeply. who knows – i might not have acne! certainly if i had the capacity to sleep on my back, lying flat and still, with a subtle smile on my face and my hands folded politely over my stomach, i would already be the kind of person that didn’t need to go to sleep at ten p.m. to catch even the smallest glimmer of a chance that i would get my eight hours, and a miserable eight hours at that. i wouldn't be so hungry.

here we are. in the kitchenette i am turning the sticky knob on the extractor hood, so that a single yellow bulb coated in vaporized cooking byproduct can light our electric stovetop. this is as much as we need.

i am worried about how much of my life feels exactly like this, mid-waking, glassesless, deslippered. everything i do is the thing i am doing here, except that here i am almost angry: pouring a stupid bowl of corn flakesname brand and an organic variety sweetened with pear juice, which is distinctly thicker; it's the difference between potato crisps and chips. and muesli and quaker life multigrain cereal into a stupid bowl with unsweetened almond milk to shovel into my stupid mouth. i am insatiable until i take it too far, until i make myself sick. if it hasn’t happened yet, it won’t.

for these purposes the light of peripheral streetlamps is enough. i sit at the window and stare at the park outside and enjoy. welcome to my kingdom.

00:00:00

here is the precipice of a bad night. here, we might save it.

insatiability is the word. i have always never felt intrinsically that i must stop, that my desire for anything pleasurable had natural, internal limits or rules. i need to write it down or scold myself or make it a game or loop one of three or four songs for an hour to keep my life on the rails in any capacity.

discipline cracks, shatters, and then i piece it back together. this is normal now, and i haven’t been letting it bother me so much since it has started happening often, in various simultaneous instances, on parallel, sometimes perpendicular, tracks. i run these tracks in short, tight circles – monthly, weekly, daily, hourly. i am starting again constantly in an endlessly iterative process of exercising my powers of composure, except i think i am noticing shifting baselines, except i think i am getting worseclimate change of the soul..

i used to be better: if i take the stairs to my class on the eleventh floor, i can check my phone on the landing of the seventh flight; i can have breakfast after i exercise for an hour; i can send this text if i write X words today; i'll have more fun listening to my favorite song if i walk instead of taking the bus; once i read to page Xa multiple of 25. i canand really read it, every last word and once more, in case i wasn’t paying it my full attention, so that any of these things and all of this together could mean something.–!; once i pass the sign for rue de bullion i can stop runningand i always ran a little further, to the next block, choosing a trash bin to measure this by instead, because when my heart was already pounding these games had the inarticulate capacity to scare me.; if i get to their apartment at the exact minute we set to meet, then, –!; if – then – if – then – finally. if i was good, i could sleep at night.

it’s worse now: breakfast if i send this email, if i can get dressed in the morning listening to a polish news broadcast instead of the same song i have been listening to for months; a bagel instead of oatmeal if i can bring myself to listen to nothing at all; a bagel if i don’t eat three bowls of cereal before going to bed; i can reactivate my social media account and check it if i leave the house to do it.

there is so little in me now to exert discipline. i lack discipline because i don’t sleep and i don’t sleep because i lack discipline. anathema – i have resorted to phone-in-bed. at the edges of sleep my discipline is the thinnest. the metaphysical detritus of daily experience, slicked onto the film of my vision, dries up and cracks. i perceive it all through a thick, crumbling glaze, and this confounds and frustrates me as it would a monstrous ogre. all my life i have helmed an at once voracious, swollen, restless, and indolent body.

the other night when i could not sleep i gathered all of my mental capacities to slump over my laptop and send my friend abroad in china a poem about a monstrous, miserable person rendered monstrous by a miserable love. there is something in it like this:

I want to be разноюi can't translate this word. nothing
Street filth, itsfeminine noun, could be 'her.' water
… Insignificant, captivated, dumb.

at the end of discipline i am full of all the garbage i have put in my brain and body, no freer than i was before. at the end of discipline i start taking long, scalding showers, under which my body shudders to a swaying stupor. but this isn’t rest.

here, we will finally get to what i really want to talk aboutwhat you’re here to listen to. and i am sorry, because i really should have gotten you that glass of water, with a slice of lemon and sprig of mint, i haven’t forgotten.

01:00:00

this hour is the end of discipline. it doesn’t matter what we do here. i might turn on my desk lamp and use the indirect light to look at my acne in the small mirror i’ve hung up near my bedroom door, or i might get on my laptop. extraordinary machine. when i was young this was the means by which i lived a double life.

life as i lived it was a dream. i was maybe ten years old when i started, and fourteen when i learned what to call it: a nascent hedonism.

my unrestricted access to the internet was more unrestricted still when i stayed up very late, late enough so that no one at the surface of my life could bother me. i learned, obliquely, about my body and its limits: one or two hours after my surface-self went to sleep – after my mother told me goodnight – i experienced an almost-defeating bout of extreme sleepiness, eyes shuttering, body slumping, which i fought through vigorously. at the other end of this i could go on, and on, until my mind had its fill.

i chased on the internet what surprised me, what thrilled, what made me laugh. (one of my very first activities: google images, ‘funny pictures.’ this kept me entertained for hours and i searched this regularly and looked at the same results each time.) i made accounts and alternate email addresses and i made friends and i wrote stories and i took quizzes and i played flash games and i watched movies for adults and i downloaded .exe files while my heart raced and i made art with my trackpad and i traded animal crossing villagers on a forum and i watched people play video games which i later tried to pirate and i laughed myself sick or scared, and no one, no one, no one, could know.

because i did this at night and because i did this by myself, because i saw swear words and illicit jokes and talked to strangers and saw pornography and saw dead bodies and saw people’s nudes and saw hate speech and saw even more perverse pornography i had to keep this a secret. i realize now the need for this nightly flight created itself: the pressure of maintaining all this, my double life, demanded the very release it offered. now i am just embarrassed, and wish that i had played sports instead, like a normal american child.

i realize now there must have never been a time in my life when i slept more than eight hours at night at best. i had to wake up, go to school and do well there. in order to lead any kind of successful double life, the surface life must be unimpeachable.

02:00:00

at night i could eat how i liked. when i left the warm dark of my room it was for cool kitchen tiles under a microwave light.

my aunt was the closest family my mother had in this country and the only polish person my father knew on this side of the pacific. for every celebration that called her to drive an hour and a half across the bay area swamp that separated us, she brought with her a large bakery cake with whipped cream frosting and fresh fruit on top and in between layers of soft vanilla sponge. it congealed and became denser under its own weight in the fridge. this was my most ideal, most perfect nighttime snack.

i had other tastes besides, some reserved almost exclusively for the night. in my daytime life, nothing could ever compel me towards the tall, microwaved glass of cow’s milk i grew accustomed to cupping in both hands and slowly sipping as i trawled the midnight internet. this was someone else; it might have even been me.

some years later, on a handful of occasions, i decanted small amounts of vodka into the same plastic water bottleit was a dasani water bottle, so i must have gotten it from the movie theater.. it was an exploratory exercise and the risk outweighed the imagined experience, so i let it alone.

shortly after this time i made the same trip to gather benadryl, enough to get moderately high. after ingestion i sat on my bedroom floor with my brow pressed against my bedframe, staring at the place on the carpet where i had spotted a bug, listening to fireworks which reached me in that moment like cannons set off underwater. i had miscalculated. it was the fifth of july, and i was not alone in that night.

i had done this because at this time i was fascinated by relentlessly mean girls on the internet who, among other things, regularly got high on benadryl and blogged about it. i rejected every form of social currency except the extremely specific kind wielded by people who casually and explicitly told other people on the internet to kill themselves, to great acclaim. i watched all of this amused, angry, incredulous, and deeply, deeply curious. how could i sleep, when i could miss this exact sociability, which was made for me?

i didn’t know what anything was like or how anything was; all i knew was that i wanted, and i embarrass myself now recalling the attempt at getting.

03:00:00

somehow, incredibly, i still made friends in my surface life. i was lucky in that, to a certain extent – and imagine each of these words individually highlighted, emphasized, underlined – they were like me.

we saw one another at school, and then at night, on skype groupchats, on the secondary and later tertiary instagram accounts that we made just to follow each other, on an obscure app called vent, on 8tracks, on swapdoodle for the nintendo 3DS, in the comments sections of our own unlisted youtube videos, in tumblr direct messaging, on drawpile, on minecraft, in our animal crossing villages, on our own streams with view counts in the single digits, on a shared google doc. there existed endless capacities for sociability. when we spent time at each other’s houses we said ‘this is like when we call but worse.’ we spent an astonishing amount of time together, by any measure. i will never know friendship – companionship, in the most literal sense – like this ever again. it is the closest you can get to sharing a brain. the internet took every aspect of our sensesenses? sense of selves? of self and cognition and made it manifest across an endless number of domains, made whole again by the sum of a host of moving parts, endlessly and crucially shareable. my double life had split and splintered, and i was deeply known. we kept each others secrets long enough for them to become our own. we loved each otheri know we did..

we stayed up at night together to watch the time change, just to cheer and laugh when it happened. we stayed up to listen to an album, a comedy special, the same video on loop for an hour to annoy ourselves and laugh about it, to listen to our friend play pokémon black on his 3DS, to watch the social network. i sometimes turned off my microphone just to listen to them listen. everything was funny and everything was fun. hedonism shared is hedonism doubled, tripled, later halved, because this could not last indefinitely.

i was falling behind. i would sleep early, tapping out at eleven p.m. and reading the messages i had missed first thingi kept my phone under my pillow; i had been doing this since i was ten, when it wasn’t a phone but an ipod touch. next morning.

the surface life pressed upon me its demands. the supervision of adult became more piercing, the obligations more serious. in my daytime life i had followed every single rule i had ever been subject to, and now the rules multiplied. i lived in awe of the mechanisms of control and surveillance – stated or otherwise – placed above and around my adolescent body, something so much more than the sum of its parts and the intentions therein, a monstrous order that no adult subject, individually, seemed to know or care a lot about. i asked for instruction and clarification constantly. it sometimes seemed to me that i was the only one who cared about the terrible thing they had created.

i changed, got worse, and struggled to keep myself in check. and another twist of the knife: at rest, in fitful dreams, the night was no longer mine. i had locked myself into a sociability that i could not bear to live without, and that i could not bear to hand over to anyone else. nighttime was a territory shared, no longer my own dear, distant expanse of unclaimed possibility. it required the same level of management, regulation, and vigilance that my daytime life asked of me. there were consequences to both presence and absence. i saw myself usurped. i got meaner.

when i was fifteen we expanded operations. i introduced everyone in lunchtime hallways and during the night we all became welded to each other anew. group got bigger, the projects more audacious, the calls longer, the nights reanimated over, and over, and over. the activities changed and the hours logged more ridiculous – what does it mean, what can it possible feel like, to have played team fortress 2 for over a thousand hours of your young, beautiful life? while i slept they became better friends with each other than they were, initially, with me; i knew it was true because i made it up and i felt it. i couldn’t control it – only read the messages the next morning, angrily. it was my night.

there is a ghost of that sociability running through this night, too. i can feel it. and i am sorry. i really do wish we weren’t both here right now, or that you could at least have a glass of water with a slice of lemon and a sprig of mint in your hand while you watch me go through this.

at this time i was already waking up too early. for lack of anything else to do i biked to school before anyone else, and under a lurid orange-pink californian sky i read children of dune because i wanted to change. i am insatiable until i make myself sick.

04:00:00

one thing you can do as a sixteen-year-old girl on the internet is develop a restrictive eating disorder. it happened during lockdown – i never said i was original! i was not influenced by any online forum community, nor was i influenced by unrealistic bodily proportions or diets promoted on social media – it was a completely individual project of insularity, mediated and bound to the internet in the sense that in a reactionary impulse to the boundless, laissez-faire consumption – and, really, free will and freedom of expression – of my friends it remained my one, my only, most consistent and loyal companion, use in a different way and towards different ends.

it was a game before it was anything else, a feat of endurance no different than my midnight sprints at age ten. and on the first day of trying, stumbling down stairs, heady off the high of deep hunger, it was funny, because that was still who i was – ‘funny pictures.’ the more i played the more i realized there was something deep inside me that wanted to tell about itself in this way.

this was the end of hedonism and the beginning of my very best discipline.

my night self was the antithesis of the person that this thing inside of me needed to become. i pushed myself deeper and away. i pushed myself farther than i thought i could go. i daydreamed about the most drastic measures i could take and took them. cutting off all contact with the people i cared about most in the world was just one experiment in this vein. misery, petty and suburban, was the game, and it was a slow burn but i got there eventually and sat in it, unimpressed.

i directed my insatiability towards the desire for a truly, deeply ascetic life. i needed to make myself smaller and sharper, beyond reproach because i was beyond visibility or notice; i needed to disappear because my life – my real life – happened in the stark light of day. by the end of this i talked to no one except for my mom. by the end of this i could keep my phone in a drawer for hours and hours, because no one texted me and i didn’t want them to. my friends who were older than me graduated and those who didn’t dutifully ignored me.

i tried to stop wanting and that made me want more, because i wasn’t doing any of this right. i was motivated by self-disgust, a latent shame for my years of midnight flights, the abnormality of this, the way that i had overstimulated my mind and, seemingly, deadened and broke it, until i had become the person i realized, at sixteen, that i really was – angry, hungry, shallow.

i wanted a deeper self. running through my town and neighbouring ones was a multi-use, whole-access rail trail that became one of the grooves of this new life. my bikeit was really my mother’s; its frame was too big for me, and i had to hop to get on and off it became my most precious object. i biked every day, furiously; to school, to joann’s fabrics, to chuck e. cheese, to safeway, to my favorite swingsets in town, to the movie theater, alongside the six-lane boulevard where i once collided with a slow car, huffing tarmac scent, huffing exhaust fumes, my own sweat, an earbud dangling to one side, helmetless. i loved my bike and i loved how i moved on it, and when it became a means by which to enforce discipline it was really all a big trick.

i was obsessed with the cheesecake factory and i biked there along the rail trail, to the mall, beneath an interstate overpass, alongside an asphalt canal and dried grasses, just to see it. i never went, i never came close, because even the ridiculous journey there could not justify my hypothetical desires. i watched videos of people online eating the cheesecakes instead, trying each one, giving an account.

i biked to the library because i thought i was stupid, and before i left suburbia to live a real life somewhere else i needed to educate myself. the only escape from myself was to read and read constantly. i read dead souls and all the books by all the brontë sisters except for the professor, which doesn’t count, and war and peace and crime and punishment, and flaubert and everything that was good by henry james while taking pictures on my phone of the parts i liked, and edith wharton and jean rhys and brideshead revisited and camus and chekhov and didn’t know what any of it meant. i read the wikipedia page for the iranian revolution and looked at constructivist art and listened to an audiobook about chernobyl. i checked out a book from the library called the history of russia because i thought that these were how these things worked, because i thought i might read something like that. i thought that this was how intellectual and cerebral people were made, that if i committed myself to the pursuit of knowledge i would stop being hungry.

my relationship with the internet did not end. it became a critical aid to my project, a means to an end, and i respected very little of it. my engagement was urgent, clipped, and regulated. it was to fill time in between meals, when i wasn’t at school, when i wasn’t on my bike, when i wasn’t sleeping. my engagement was no longer participatory, but observational. i watched videos of female body builders or competitive eater consuming astonishing amounts of calories. i read russian poetry. i followed the blogs of miserable women in their early twenties, who were my idols.

my days became structured, and sleep, as all activities, took place in rigid bounds. i wanted all time to pass, and sleep was an effective way of making this happen, and so i planned around it and followed all of its dictates; eight hours of the day in which i didn’t feel hungry were deeply precious to me. otherwis,e time stretched out in front of me, and i, dejected and distraction-free, watched it go on endlessly. after six a.m. i was hopelessly awake, my sense of it all undiluted, staring straight at it. i feared an empty expanse of hours, fluid and unstructured time which demanded that i give an account of myself.

i hated the single-track of my brain, its focus, the way it spun in circles, hopelessly and relentlessly awake. i tried making myself better and more interesting to myself, having better thoughts. i recorded bird song on my phone and as i did it i wished that this was the thing that could take me out of myself, that i didn’t need to mimic passion for art or curiosity about the world, that i just felt it, fully and without concessions. i wished that i could care only about beauty and truth, that didn’t have consumptive desiresVery Cherry Ghirardelli® Chocolate Cheesecake., that i didn’t even know what it was i could have.

i wanted desperately to be religious, catholic, because i hated america and i wished that my parents had not come here. my mom told me once that if she hadn’t come to america she would be a librarian in olsztyn driving a little fiat. i didn’t tell her that i didn’t see the problem. in poland we could have all been happier. in poland we could have slept more soundly. i could have even slept on my back. i can’t say this. i don’t have the right nor the nerve.

there is so much else to say that is not as important as this: i wish i could have made it all stop, whenever i wanted. more than anything i wished i could have slept at any time, at will, until i got better.

05:00:00

my mother can’t sleep because she worries about my sick sister in california and her sick parents in gmina bargłów kościelny. at the end of this night i am ashamed that i wasn’t a better daughter and a more successful child, but i am glad that we have at least this thing in common.

she listens to podcasts to sleep, because she gets lonely and likes to hear people talking to her. i had been telling her about the unbounded harms of phone-in-bed, but i don’t think it’s my place. for a stretch of time she had been using a specific combination of drugs to sleep: melatonin, benadryl, trazodone, all together and regularly, even nightly. her doctor said it was okay.

my mom grew up sharing a small room with two of her sisters, and sharing a bed with one of them. the house was small but the farm was big, so the work was hard and there was lots of it. my mom had no time for a double life; she just slept. she read books constantly, at meals, at school, after work, not because she was trying to be someone else but because she wanted to. at the end of all of this, again, i am sorry that i can’t be more like her, then, that i want anything different from what she worked all her life to give me.

she has three cups of coffee per day: fully caffeinated in the morning, halfway caffeinated at lunch, decaffeinated in the mid-afternoon.

06:00:00

i make my bed every night as i sleep and i make it again when i wake up. i do this without fail. this is not a mark of discipline; it is an immovable, self-contained imperative.

i gather the detritus of the bed and put it in its place; earplugs lost sometime during the night, recovered and put away; socks found and folded; pillow and quilt saved from the floor. i fold my pajamas and place these at the edge of a straightened pillow. i shake out the duvet and lay it over all, then the quilt. straighten the edges. it is the most natural and normal impulse i recognize within myself. i just have to do it. whatever happened in the night needs to be set right and made comprehensible in this way, neatly closed. i am only myself when i am assuredly upright.

most times when i tell people that i can only wake up at this time, that i am unable, physically unable, to sleep more than this, they tell me that i am very lucky.

i don’t know. i don’t think so. the stores don’t open until eight a.m. at the earliest, and surely you saw me pour the last of my almond milk last night.