Chapter Fourteen: Second Awakening (~jinghan)

I curl up tightly under the doona in my dark room.

And hour ago I had crawled out of bed ready to go out: a day with the family and driving hours for my licence. I amble to the loo, pain, and then blood in my urine. And an hour later I’m back in bed listening to the car reverse out of the driveway.

I lie there being angry at my body for being weak and pathetic. Anticipating the fact that I’ll have to now argue with my parents to let me go to my friends party tonight. Anticipating a long cold day of boredom and loneliness, unsure whether I should just get up, shake off the tiredness and do some study since I have nothing better to do with my day now.

The hot air coming off the radiator rustles the paper cranes hanging from my ceiling. The morning light seeping through the blind is sleepy and grey. I’ve put an extra doona on my bed and it is warm and heavy.

And before I know it I’m as good as unconscious. Asleep.

Dream of remembering eating burritos in Adelaide: the creamy rice on the inside that oozed out everywhere as I took messy bites from the foil packet, then licking it from the end of the packet and from my fingers. I dream that I’m making burritos in my kitchen, except I don’t know what the ingredients are and nothing in the fridge looks like something that’ll go in a burrito.

How long have I been asleep? It takes an immense amount of effort to open my eyes. I catch a glimpse of my phone on my bed side table. Good, I can check it for the time. My left arm is numb and heavy with sleep. With sheer will power I heft it over my body. It regains feeling and I reach for the phone.

As my fingers collide with the surface of the table I realise something is wrong. I cannot see my hand at all. I wave it before my eyes. Nothing. I pass my thumb over my right eye. The light does not change. What? I reach out for the table again blindly feeling around and find the shape of my lip-gloss. But my eyes that are watching the table intently don’t see a hand at all.

I grope around and find the shape that is my phone and drag it towards me. I breath a sigh of relief as I see the phone slide towards the edge of the table in sync with my movements. But then as I pick up the phone, the one that I can see stops moving and just sits there, obediently at the edge of the table. I’m bewildered.

With some effort I flip my phone open with my left hand. I can feel the smooth cold plastic against the side of my head. My head is sleep and heavy. I spend several minutes willing it to turnover and look at the phone. I hear the sound of my family coming back into the house in the distance beyond the door.

Ooof. My head finally turns as if suddenly released from a weight. For a second I don’t know what has happened. I wiggle my fingers and the details straighten out. My hand where I thought my phone was is empty, my lip gloss is in fact on my study desk, and the house is still quiet and still.

This time I reach out and flip open my phone without any surreal occurrences. I’m so busy marvelling at the brilliancy of my dream mind that I almost forget to actually look at the time.

It’s 2pm I’ve been asleep for 4 hours. I feel completely timeless.

I roll out of bed. And make my way to the door. I glimpse the toilet in the open doorway of the bathroom across the hallway just before the light from the window overwhelms my retinas and starry-eyed vertigo kicks in. Blindly I walk into the bathroom-

BANG!

I recoil, put my hand to the sore spot on my head and look up. The door to the bathroom is in fact closed. So maybe I wasn’t as awake as I thought.

“Ha. I just woke up from the dream twice. Inception style.” I manage to thumb into my phone and send to my friend before I am preoccupied by how hungry I am.

My lunch is rice with leftovers. But it tastes like burritos…

It’s 5pm when I wake up again. But 5:40pm after a trip to the bathroom…

I’ve been asleep for 17 hours out of the last 19 hours. Damn impressive.

And I haven’t been nearly as bored as I thought I would be. Or, if this world of crazy ideas is the manifestation of boredom; then boredom, my friend, I have missed you.