Three
It’s not my friend’s voice I hear. It’s male – nasal, but sharp, like an electrical current that has been shaped into language, but also reverberating in a filter to produce a tight echo. And low. It might be coming from my left shoulder, but directed into my ear, worming into my head, startling me not just because they’re words in the middle of the night, but because they grate. I can’t process this the way I would other words. They have a serrated quality that saws through my mind. There are so many things the voice sounds like, so many things it can be, but none of these descriptions…
One
I always worry that death will be a restless sleep, that there won’t be peace, but a constant tossing and turning trying to find something that’s always out of my capacity to achieve. I’ve had sleeping difficulties all my adult life, so when I wake now, I’m unsurprised. I don’t know the time. My clock radio has an LCD display – I bought it years ago for specifically that reason: LCD numbers don’t glow in the dark, and don’t remind me of the time. That’s just one of the sleep strategies I’ve learned. Most of them don’t work. Nothing works for everybody, and, for various reasons, my head’s particularly resistant.…