My baths need to be so hot that I can barely stand to put my foot in it. Flesh swelling with a million pinpricks on my nerves, heart thumping in my aching skull, red blotches smattering across my skin. It makes me feel alive in a way that nothing else does. The burning reminds me that I’m real, and for as long as I can remember I’ve needed this ritual to plant my feet in place. It seems that time has always passed without me knowing: days melting into months, months into dissolved ambitions, opportunities passed by, “what if’s”. I used to lay awake at night and watch how the shaft of light through the slit in my blinds began as blue and gradually diluted to daylight as the birds began to gossip and the street below filled with life.
I remember all of the ceilings I’ve stretched out beneath. The way the curvature of the enamel tubs held the curvatures of my body. I remember the tap fixtures, the severity of their limescale, whether the grout clinging to tiles had flecks of mould in it or not. At night, when I couldn’t sleep, I’d close my eyes and transport myself across the world in this manner: the ceiling fan of the hotel bathroom on my first backpacking trip in Asia, the chipped ceramic soap dish fixed to the wall of the bath in a ski resort in Canada, the salmon pink tub shaped like an oyster at a relaxation retreat in Scotland. My lack of sleep, and the subsequent loneliness that infested my life, meant that every place, detail or interaction, no matter how menial, became a raw material for me to dissect and analyse in the depths of my own isolation.
Often, I wished that everyone else felt how I felt, too. That the woman who ran past my building at six every morning could feel the stagnation of being too fatigued to exercise. That the man three doors down who re-tied his tie in the lift mirror every day could feel the failure of being reprimanded at work for falling behind on his tasks. In the early hours of the morning, when my muscles cried with tension and my eyes smarted with strain, I wished that every single person, no matter how old or young, good or bad, pleasant or dreadful, would feel the dismay of desperately trying to reach out and grasp their likes, their interests, their dreams, their relationships and having them slip through their fingers like vapour.
And then one day, they did.
It’s been three months and seventeen days since everyone’s sleep stepped outside of their bodies.
It happened all at once, faster than the epidemics and wars and natural disasters that pop up on the news, which everyone shakes their head at and then scrolls past whilst they’re sitting on the toilet or in the queue at the post office. Restless, I was padding around the kitchen, wiping a surface whilst waiting for the kettle to boil when I heard my neighbour, Alex, scream. I grabbed a knife from the drawer and ran into the hallway. Alex was on the floor, making herself as small as she could against the wall, her bloodshot eyes riddled with terror and flitting between me and her doorway. Brandishing the knife with wild uncertainty, I stood in front of her and peered into the threshold, where a figure was casually leaning against the wall, unbothered by my slashing at the air.
“I’ve called the police!” I shouted.
The shadowy figure turned their hand over and began to pick at their nails. A couple more people rushed from their doors, eager to identify the chaos.
“They were there when I woke up, sitting on the end of my bed,” Alex cried, “just staring at me!”
“Who are you?” I shouted. “What do you want?”
I lunged forward with the knife and swiped the hallway light on and staggered backwards in horror. Despite the fluorescent bulbs above us, the figure remained completely silhouetted, as though its outline was a transparent casing housing a black mist. It shrugged its shoulders and edged down the wall, sitting with its knees against its chest, and continued to pick at its nails. It was a perfect silhouette of Alex.
Another scream echoed down the hall. Then another. Then another.
I awoke the next morning feeling as though I’d just resurfaced from a long soak in a warming pool of water. I stretched my arms above my head and felt the give and pull of my muscles waking up, of energy invigorating their very tissue. The light through the blinds was high and golden, and when I glanced at the alarm clock on the bedside table I did a double take. 1pm. I hadn’t slept for that long in years. As I rubbed the blear from my eyes I flicked the TV on to the news. Everywhere, across the entire nation, people’s sleep had physically stepped outside of their bodies. Dishevelled reporters, accompanied by their silhouetted clones who paced behind their desks or looked disconcertingly down the lens of the camera, repeated that although the government had declared a state of emergency, it was crucial to remain calm and to try and continue life as ordinary. I propped myself up on an elbow, opened the window and listened to the tension of the outside world filter through the crack into my room.
Days progressed. The news was host to a variety of doctors, psychiatrists and philosophers who gave censored speeches of reassurance and empty advice on how to relax at night, ranging from guided meditations to heavy dosages of sleeping pills. A couple of days later, a shortage of medications was announced. The tension through my window swelled from agitated drivers pounding their fists on their horns, children wailing in frustration as their mothers dragged them by the wrist, and dogs throatily snarling at the silhouettes, to people brawling in the streets, businesses closing their doors and so many car crashes that a temporary curfew and driving ban darkened the streets as soon as the sun descended. All the while every night, as soon as my thoughts began to drift and my eyelids grew heavy, the tension in my muscles gave way almost immediately to the pillowy down of my duvet and I was held by both my mattress and some unbeknownst blessing dealt to me by some ironic higher power, for the full night.
I began to write a column in the newspaper.
I hadn’t written in months. Each time I set up my laptop, journal and pen on my desk, alongside everything I could possibly need for the session—hot drink, cold drink, sweet snack, savoury snack, chargers, glasses, stopwatch, spare pen—my mind jumped to everything else that I needed to do with my time, including but not limited to the laundry, the food shopping, finding a new job, studying a master’s degree, achieving world peace. I would stare at the same blemish on the wall and whenever my eye glanced over the bare face of the page in front of me, I would writhe in my seat until one glance too many made me abandon my post and get up to complete a menial task like kicking the recycling box to the side of the street. But after I began to sleep, nothing could stop the onslaught of thoughts, ideas and prose from flowing out of me onto the page, as though the world’s abrupt descent into hell had unstopped a cork that was wedged deep in my brain.
I became fascinated with the devolution of the world around me, and the column only prodded my fascination into obsession. I encouraged people to write to me about their current situations, anonymously of course. Someone said that their baby responded more to their silhouette’s presence than to theirs, and that they resented both of them for it. Someone said they were terrified of how they felt, and that the only logical conclusion to such sleep depravity was a slow and hallucinatory death. Someone else said they felt like a terrible person because the thing they missed most about their regular life was having the energy to have sex. As days rolled on, the number of stories in my inbox increased, and whilst sifting through the admissions, I noticed that although everyone seemed to be completely miserable, they were miserable together. They each shared a common foe. They each desperately wanted to return to normality. They each were trying to take care of themselves in ways so extreme that multi-million pound beauty corporations couldn’t have begun to imagine the routines to sell to you. But they were together. There was camaraderie in the correlation of their experiences. And I felt rejected. Though I’d spent countless nights sobbing on the floor, praying to a God that I wasn’t even sure I believed in just to make me well, to allow me to sleep, now that I finally could I felt like an alien, an outsider, an other, all over again. The downfall of the woman jogging past my window that I’d fantasised about had truly happened—no one had jogged in a long time by now—and I felt no satisfaction at my triumph over hers. Although my body was wonderfully rested and my mind as clear and sharp as glass, I wanted more than anything to be a part of something bigger than me. I realised that what I always wanted wasn’t for everyone else to wallow in the pain I was experiencing. I was wanting for a world that would accept my pain and not judge me for it. That would try its best to hold me above water, if only for a few seconds at a time. Now it seemed that the world was providing that grace for everyone else but me.
So, I faked it.
It’s been over a month since the first day. People are still trying. The fighting has dropped alongside people’s energy, and when I encounter neighbours in the street, my eyes smeared in hues of blue and purple eyeshadow, we exchange mumbled niceties before their silhouettes drag them onward, keeping the world running one pull of the elbow at a time. I make up a different story about where my silhouette is each time; taking out the rubbish, driving my car to get serviced by another silhouette, fixing a satellite dish up on the roof. Nobody remembers what I said the day before to question me. I brew myself a coffee when I get through the door and revel at the smell of it permeating my skin, my clothes, my house. Of finally being able to drink caffeine again. I sift through my column emails, which have gotten further and fewer as each day progresses. Through the regular misspelled paragraphs about aching muscles, cluster migraines and descents into madness, a jewel beckons and winks among the mundane.
“Dear reader,
I’ve been waiting with bated breath to see if the same thing would happen to me - if I’d wake with a start one morning to find a silhouette of myself using my toothbrush in the bathroom or collecting the morning paper from the doormat. I am confused and slightly scared to say that it hasn’t. I don’t know why.
I know this column is a space for people to vent their frustrations, and in no way is this meant to be boastful or intended to make other people feel angry. I just don’t know what to do. I don’t want my brain to be dissected like some lab rat but I’m also going crazy with loneliness. It’s weird being the only one, you know?
Anyway, I hope this reaches someone, somewhere, if it’s ever published. I hope the world is put to rights soon.”
Each night, as dusk blots out the sun, the world becomes a very lonely place. I have taken to driving my car for miles on end, something that I used to detest as much as the sun sifting through my blinds on yet another sleepless night. Although the ban was never lifted, traffic wardens and police patrols are so rare that no one has ever noticed me speeding down the motorway blaring music on the speed cameras, let alone in person. Tonight, however, my drive feels different. No matter how loudly I scream along with the lyrics, my mind cannot help flitting back to the email. The confession I’d been too terrified to make. The other person who is like me.
All I ever wanted was for someone to tell me that I wasn’t going crazy. That yes, this is hard, but I’m in it with you. We can support each other. We’re going to get through this together. Yet, when I get home, my finger hesitates over the reply button. I stare at the same spot on the wall. I writhe in my seat.
I have wanted to be well, to fit in, for as long as I can remember. Here is the perfect opportunity to make the difference that I’ve always wanted, I say to myself aloud. To form a connection over an experience. To share the same camaraderie that everyone else is, but this time it could be genuine. I could make a real, tangible difference. But replying means being different again. Swimming upstream. The unknown.
My finger hovers over send.
