In the middle of the night, I woke and shuffled half-awake to the bathroom, with no idea of where I was. I knew I lived somewhere in Brooklyn but surely this wasn’t the place. I tried to recall the faces of my roommates, stared at the dark still shapes of the living room, illuminated by the leaky grey light from the window, but nothing concrete came to mind by the time I had returned to my bedroom.

The night before that I went to bed at 12:00am and woke later on, bright and alert, only to turn over in bed and find that the mean blinking orange of my clock read 1:30am. 

I mete out the pretty little sleeping tablets my mum gave me in half portions. They are gone after three days. Or should I say three nights. Because I am not sure what time it is. I flew back from the future and gained a day. In the early evenings, and the mornings, and the afternoons, a strange whirring exhaustion encircles me and I wonder if this is what dying feels like.  

I wonder if there is a charity for insomniacs and resolve at 2am that I should donate them a large sum of money for their collective pain.

I realise that all airplane pilots and flight attendants are criminally insane — after all how do they work on a topsy-turvy schedule of sleeplessness? Just know that when a stewardess is smiling at you and asking you what you would like to drink and you ask for extra milk in your tea, she is so exhausted that she probably wants to stab you repeatedly with a small plastic fork.

I flew from a subtropical summer and found myself in New York winter. It makes sense that travelling the world used to take months in a leaky ship because, who the hell are we kidding, the body needs that long to adjust to this inconceivable shift in geography and time. 

I feel the drift of sleep tug me and I say yes yes yes please please please but I miss the wave and find myself wide-awake ten minutes later, writing a short rom com in my head that wins me an Oscar. The rom com seems utterly hilarious and original at 3am and so cliché I could weep the next day.

Oh sleep, I miss you. Please can we be friends, again?