The Problem with Sleep

There’s this girl.

She has a problem with falling asleep. Not in the usual way that people might think. When we say she has problem with falling asleep, I mean that she doesn’t want to fall asleep. The main reason behind which is that she doesn’t want to wake up.

Let’s take the case of last Tuesday night. Tuesday was a holiday. Monday was terrible, and she fell asleep the moment she lay on the bed after dutifully brushing her teeth and brushing her hair. She had looked forward to falling asleep the whole Monday long. And then she woke up on Tuesday morning.

“No,” she groaned.

“No, I don’t want to wake up, it’s so horrible to be awake,” she thought.

She spent her Tuesday holiday slowly, taking her time. She didn’t bother to change out of her pyjamas until she felt she really needed to shower, around noontime. She made herself a nicely heavy late lunch which she thought was enough for three people to eat. She spent the rest of the afternoon eating all of it; some while watching TV, some while aimlessly surfing the internet, and some while dutifully working on the preparations for work the next day. She alternately brewed tea and coffee and sipped them while watching rented videos – all romantic comedies. When the last of the videos’ credits were rolling, she looked up at the clock and saw that it was 1:30 a.m. and she felt a bit sleepy.

And that’s the problem. She didn’t want to sleep.

“No,” she moaned, “I don’t want to wake up again.”

But she turned off the TV and got off the couch anyway and dutifully did the dishes, brushed her teeth and her hair, put on her pyjamas, switched off the lights, and went to bed.

And cried, silently. And fell asleep.

The Small World

I have been to two countries. My mother country, and Japan.

In Japan, I have met many people who have travelled to many, many countries all over the world. The Japanese love to travel: they work their bones off, earn the dough, and take advantage of their few holidays to go wherever they want to go, whether it be within their own wondrous country, or far beyond the oceans that surround it. And I am very, very envious of them.

When I came to Japan, I've always thought of it as my one and only chance to see the real world outside of my own. I thought it would widen my world so much more. I would do something so different from what everyone around expected me to do, and what very few had the resources to spend on. So I grabbed the chance and took the plunge.

And then I met these travellers. And I heard their stories - what they've seen, the food they tasted, the music they heard, the experiences they had - and my world never felt so very small indeed. And I felt so envious. I wished I never came to Japan and saw how beautiful it is, how much BETTER it is than anything I've ever seen before. I wished I never came to Japan and met these people who have travelled and have seen so much more than I could ever experience. And I wished I never heard their first-hand stories, or seen the look on their faces as they shared their tales. How I wished that the BIG world stayed in the pictures and the screens and my dreams where no one REAL actually exists. Hearing those first-hand stories from real people made that big world real, too. And all the more painfully unreachable.

How small my world is, I thought. How confined. I thought I'd free myself, and I did, for a while, only to find myself merely in a bigger cage. Or is it?

My travel has been beautiful. Soon it will be over. I will have to go back to my even smaller world. But I'm not sorry for it, I don't regret anything. Perhaps the big world is merely waiting for me. Perhaps I'll have another chance to escape again, for a little while.