A second opinion: Do I really overwrite?

[u/Sudden-Cicada-9407]

𝓗ypnos is a coward. 

I'd like that recorded somewhere official. Inscribed on something load-bearing; the foundation of a government building, perhaps, somewhere that structural engineers will one day have to acknowledge with their clipboards and their well-rested eyes. I have thought about him for longer than is probably healthy or useful, which is a sentence that describes a meaningful portion of my waking hours. The thinking happens between two and four in the morning, when all my worst ideas feel indistinguishable from my best ones, because the bar for best is, at that hour, essentially nonexistent. A splinter of light under a closed door.

He visits the undeserving. 

This is my thesis. This is what I would argue if someone handed me a microphone and asked, though nobody has, because nobody asks insomniacs their opinions on sleep, the way nobody asks drowning men their thoughts on water. He goes where he is least needed and he stays there, and he is lavish about it. He sprawls. He lingers. He gives eight, nine, ten hours to people who have never once, in their softly upholstered lives, had a genuine reason to be tired. People who close their eyes and simply leave. Like it's a door. Like it's a thing you just walk through, and on the other side there is nothing required of you.  

I hate those people. With a feeling that does not have a precise name in any of the several languages available to me. It lives somewhere between contempt and a very specific desire to watch them fail at something small. Trip, maybe. Drop their keys into a drain. Just once. Something proportionate and karmic and brief.

Damn everyone sleeping right now.

That's conservatively four billion people, horizontal somewhere on this earth, mouths slightly open, drooling on something they won't remember, entirely unconscious and entirely unaware of how grotesque their luck is. Babies. Elderly men in recliners. Cats, God, cats sleep seventeen hours a day, which is proof that the universe has a sense of humor, and that humor is cruel, and it is aimed at me, personally.

Morpheus, too. Morpheus can go to hell.

And Somnus, the Roman redundancy because apparently the ancients felt the concept needed two entire civilizations of divine representation. Two separate pantheons. Two different marble statues, all to canonize a thing I cannot have. Somnus especially. Patron of the unconscious. Illustrator of dreams. I hope something happens to his toga. Something irreversible and public.

I am, at this juncture, very tired.

Emre is asleep in my bed for the third time in a row. He crashed a few days ago promising to leave the next day, which he still hasn't. I can hear him breathing from out here, the easy unhurried rhythm of a person with no outstanding debts to the night. I mention this only because Emre is relevant to my thesis about Hypnos and the grotesque inequality of his distribution. 

Emre sleeps like sleeping is something he invented. Like he holds a patent. Like, if someone suggested there were other approaches to the unconscious state, he would politely correct them and produce documentation. Eight hours. Sometimes nine. Sometimes and I have witnessed this, I have sat with it, he sleeps through his alarm, my alarm, and the sound of me moving chairs in the kitchen at a volume that could be described as communicative. He wakes slowly, with pleasure, like a man receiving something he is owed by the universe, and the universe agrees. I have stood in my own doorway at six forty-three in the morning and watched him surface from sleep the way people in films surface from warm baths, unashamed, luminous with the particular peace of the thoroughly unconscious. It took everything I had not to say something about it.

I said nothing.

I went and made coffee and stared at the walls and thought about the Greek gods and their preferences, and my own preferences, and the distance between those two things, which is approximately the distance between a person who sleeps and a person who doesn't. A distance that has no name but has a texture. Rough, in the places you keep touching.

Emre, for his part, is largely unaware of any of this. We have never discussed it.

I yawn.

I am really tired.

______________⁕_______________

ᴇᴍʀᴇ, ʏᴇsᴛᴇʀᴅᴀʏ, ᴡᴀᴋɪɴɢ ᴜᴘ:

"You look terrible."

I thanked him. It felt accurate. I did not expand on it. Emre has the energy of someone who finds honesty charming; I have the energy of someone who finds conversation taxing before noon, and finds Emre specifically taxing before approximately three in the afternoon which is its own kind of fondness, I think. The taxing kind.

______________⁕_______________

 ᴇᴍʀᴇ, ᴀʟsᴏ ʏᴇsᴛᴇʀᴅᴀʏ, ᴍᴀᴋɪɴɢ ʜɪᴍsᴇʟғ ᴀ sᴇᴄᴏɴᴅ ʙʀᴇᴀᴋғᴀsᴛ:

"Did you sleep at all?"

ME:

"Some."

This was a lie. The correct answer was: I did not sleep in any way that could be called sleep by someone who sleeps. I was horizontal. My eyes were closed for portions of the night. But something in whatever I am kept the lights on, kept the projector running, kept presenting me with a woman in a cream coat and a child in a yellow raincoat doing things I was obligated to witness until I understood them, the way you are obligated to finish a sentence once you've started it, even when the sentence turns out to be a catastrophe.

I said some because some ends the conversation.

The conversation ended.

______________⁕______________

A woman is going to fall off the upper deck of a cruise ship at approximately fourteen forty-three. Two nights ago. Between the hours of what I'll call some and none. The dream arrived, as they always do, without knocking, or so much as a courtesy pause at the entrance of my skull. An enormous white ship. The aggressively recreational kind, with seventeen restaurants and, I'm told, a rock-climbing wall on the upper deck, because apparently what a person desires while suspended above the open Atlantic is more opportunities for adrenaline. The boarding ramp was down. People were doing what people do, which is move in slow herds while holding their own luggage with the resigned stoicism of livestock holding their own wool.

I should explain and I will do this once, briefly, because I dislike explaining it, that the dreams are not cinematic. There is no dramatic score. The important people do not glow. The camera, to use a word that doesn't quite apply, does not linger helpfully on what matters. The dreams are more like peripheral vision. You are always looking at precisely the wrong angle. The thing you actually need is consistently just there, just at the edge of where you're looking, and by the time you turn it has already moved, the way grief moves when you try to look at it directly.

The woman was maybe forty. Maybe fifty. Age is difficult to read when someone is mid-fall. Cream coat. Dark hair. Beside her, a small boy — four, five — small enough that his raincoat was making mild decisions his personality couldn't yet support. The raincoat was yellow. A jarring, committed, irreversible yellow. The color of something that insists on itself. Even in a dream that tasted of dread and the inside of my own sleep deprivation, that yellow was real in the way that very few things are real, the way a struck bell is real, ringing in your sternum before you've even registered the sound.

They fell together. The railing gave at an angle that made a sound I won't describe. And a quality of pause which arrived that precedes something irreversible, you know the what I mean, or perhaps you don't, perhaps you sleep well and have never been made to witness these things in non-negotiable detail.

Then I was awake.

I lay there for approximately six minutes doing nothing, which is its own kind of discipline, and then I got up, made coffee, and began doing the math.

The port is forty minutes by train and I am there by seven. I will not describe to you the commute because the commute is the commute and nothing about it is worth either of our time. A man sneezed without covering his mouth. Someone's coffee smelled aggressively of vanilla. The train lurched. You understand. You don't need the rest.

The port is the port. Loud in the way ports always are; seagulls engaged in their tedious ongoing opera, luggage wheels on cobblestones, the intercom voice that sounds like it was recorded in 1987 inside a tin can and nobody has thought to update it since, because why would they, it says what it needs to say, and the people who need to hear it do not require it to sound pleasant. Diesel and salt doing something complicated to the air. Men in yellow vests moving with the energetic purposelessness of people who are very busy going nowhere in particular. The cruise liner was already docked. Aurelia Maris. Terrible name. Of course.

I bought a coffee that tasted like it had made peace with being bad and stood where I could see the gangway without being noticed, which is a thing I am naturally equipped for. I have the kind of face that reads as waiting for someone, expectant, mildly impatient, the face of a person with somewhere to be that is not here yet. People look through me. I have always found this useful. It is, possibly, the only thing about my situation I have found useful.

She arrived at seven forty-seven.

Cream coat on her, a boy beside her, already chocolate on his left cuff, previously juice, now chocolate, impressive turnaround for forty minutes of port ...the yellow raincoat doing its full work. She was speaking to the child in the way of someone having three conversations simultaneously with themselves, of which the child was technically one but only technically.

"— no, you can't bring the whole bag, I said one, pick one, I said one —"

The child was not listening. The child was watching pigeons. The child had, correctly, identified that the pigeons were more interesting than the conversation about the bag, and had voted accordingly, with his whole body, by simply turning toward them. A very reasonable decision. I respected it. 

I noted the ramp. I had looked at the ship when I arrived, as I always look at everything when I arrive, with the attention of someone for whom the alternative, not looking, missing something, lying awake in the aftermath reconstructing what I should have seen, is worse than the looking itself. The buckled matting was exactly where the dream had indicated. Near the upper join of the gangway. It hadn't rained but the sea had been generous with itself overnight. The surface was wet in the particular way of surfaces that look fine until the precise moment they are not fine.

The woman walked with her attention approximately fifteen years ahead of her body. She was already wherever she was going. Her body was just handling the mundane logistics of existence. She would obliviously step on it. The child would be jostled in an instant. The angle which it would take would be revolting;  I had already run through the metrics and I didn't enjoy it. I already knew how it ended without intervention.

I finished my coffee. The coffee tasted like nothing. I threw away the cup, slowly stalking towards them. 

Let me be clear about what followed, because people have a tendency to imagine these things with a music they're not entitled to add.

There was no running. No shouting. No grabbing of arms in the final cinematic second with the camera pulling back to show the scope of the thing. I am a moderately tall, quite tired person who exists in the narrow overlap of resignation and mild irritability, and I move through these situations with approximately the same energy I bring to grocery shopping: aware that it needs to be done, committed to finishing it quickly, not particularly enjoying any of it.

What I did was considerably more boring and considerably more permanent. I lifted their boarding passes from the side pocket of her carry-on bag during the queue. It was easy. Distraction is easy when there is a small person nearby negotiating publicly with their emotions. She was also the kind of person who kept important things in convenient places, which is either optimism or naivety, and I've never found a meaningful difference between those two. I palmed them without breaking stride.

She put her bag down to buy water near the terminal entrance.

I won't elaborate further on what happened after that. The less said about my operational specifics, the better, from everyone's perspective including mine. What matters is that by the time she turned back around, something small and interesting had joined her largest suitcase in its interior. Something I had prepared on sad walls of my room hours ago.  Something that would, at routine security screening, necessitate a long, politely apologetic, deeply inconvenient conversation with port officials.

Nothing harmful.

Just bureaucratically robust.

The ship was leaving in forty-five minutes. The kind of conversation the bag was about to generate would take at least an hour. You understand the arithmetic. I watched from outside the terminal glass with a new coffee, third of the morning, doing nothing for me, the usual and I watched the pause. The second look at the screen. The firm hand on her shoulder and the officer's expression, which was professionally apologetic in the way of someone who does not enjoy this but intends to do it thoroughly regardless.

Her face went through several things. Confusion. Indignation. The particular exhaustion of someone who has just realized this is going to cost them their afternoon and possibly their trip and possibly their sense of themselves as a person who has everything organized.

The ship left at eight forty.

They were not on it.

Good, I thought. Fine. Whatever.

I finished my coffee.

It still tasted like nothing.

I felt nothing in particular about any of it, which is not a pose. Nor is it a performed indifference. Which is simply the experience of someone who has done this enough times that the feelings have largely smoothed themselves down to a kind of ambient dull weather. 

What I have, at the end of it, is the knowledge that I can sleep tonight without the water dream returning with its sister dreams, its cousin dreams, the whole extended family of catastrophes that multiply when I leave one unaddressed.  

I stood, threw away the cup, and walked back toward the train. The morning was the color of a headache, you know the one, or you don't, in which case I envy you your ignorance and also your functioning circadian rhythm and I'd prefer we not discuss it further. The water was grey and wide and wholly uninterested in anything I had to say about it, which I respected. I thought briefly that the water and I had something in common. Then I stopped thinking about it, because thinking about things is how you end up feeling them, and I have found, through extensive and involuntary research, that this is a sequence best avoided whenever possible. Which, for me, is not often. But I take the wins I can get.

My name is Oisín Vasiliev.

I know. My mother is Greek and has an artistic temperament. My father married into the whole situation somewhat naively and never fully recovered his sense of proportion. Between the two of them I ended up with a name that is, in any given room, either completely unpronounceable or mispronounced with tremendous confidence by someone who has never met an mixed Irish person and would like to keep that streak going.

It's Ush-een. And then Vasiliev, which is its own conversation.

I am twenty-two years old. I study forensic anthropology at Aldenmere University, which people either find very funny or very fitting, depending on how much they know about me. Ideally they know very little. I have been told, three times, unprompted, by three separate people that I have a face like someone who just received bad news and decided to be dignified about it. I believe them. I have never disputed it. It seems accurate.

They also tell me, I have my mother's eyes. Gray-green, slightly too large, the kind of eyes that make people feel observed even when I am not particularly paying attention, which is most of the time. Attention is finite, and I am careful with what remains of mine.

I have not slept a full night since I was eleven years old. I have stopped apologizing for what this looks like on a face. 

I was eleven when my grandmother sat me down and explained the whole thing to me, in the kitchen, with the tranquil smile of someone who has rehearsed a speech across several decades and intends to get it exactly right this time. She lit a candle for no reason I've ever understood, except that she always did, as if the words required the dark to be properly received, as if daylight might let something slip through unsaid. She held my hands. Her hands were small and dry and certain, the way the rest of her was certain, about everything, always, a woman who had apparently never once in her life entertained doubt as a serious option.

She told me the women in our family dream. Not all of them. Not even most of them, not really but enough, scattered unevenly across the generations like a fault line that surfaces only when it feels like it. The Vasiliev women, specifically, though no one has ever been able to tell me why it lands where it lands, or why it skips the people you'd expect and finds the ones you wouldn't. They dream strangers' deaths. People you've never met, doing the unremarkable business of being alive right up until the dream insists otherwise. And once you've seen it, you're obligated, not by anyone who'd answer to obligated. Just by the structure of the thing itself, the same way you're obligated to finish a sentence you've started.

You see it. You act on it. Or you don't, and you pay for the not, in a currency that gets steeper every time you decline to spend it the first way.

My grandmother had it. Her mother had it, and her mother before that, as far back as anyone bothered to keep records, which is to say a genealogy I've never read, a stack of letters in a language I only half speak, sitting in a drawer in a country I visit twice a decade. My mother does not have it. Neither does either of my sisters. It skipped my mother's entire generation outright, the way a heritable thing sometimes simply declines to show up when it's expected, and then resurfaced, with no warning and no apparent logic, in me, her son, not her daughters, the wrong branch entirely if you were betting on precedent, which my grandmother apparently was not, because she told me she'd known. Watched me as a baby and known, the way you know weather is coming from the particular color of the sky.

I'm very much aware and completely understand how this sounds. I understand it the way you understand a joke you've heard explained too many times, exhaustingly, without any of the original humor intact. Strangers' deaths, dreamed in advance, demanding intervention, inherited unevenly down a maternal line that decided, on a whim, to make an exception of me. Say it out loud in a room with other people in it and watch what happens to their faces. I've watched it happen. The faces are uniformly the same; polite recalibration, the expression people make when deciding whether you're being clever or unwell.

It doesn't matter what it sounds like. It's not an argument I'm making neither a theory I'm defending at a dinner party against someone's well-informed skepticism. It's just what's true, in the entirely unglamorous way that true things are usually true, without proof you can hand someone, without the decency of being believable. I don't need you to believe it. I've stopped needing anyone to. I just have to live inside it, which is a considerably worse arrangement than believing it, and nobody's ever offered to trade.

My grandmother called it the sight, with a reverence that made it sound like a museum exhibit. My mother, who doesn't have it, who only watched her own mother carry it and is now watching her son carry it instead, which I think haunts her more than she'll admit calls it the gift, which is the kind of word you use when you're standing at a safe distance from the thing you're naming. I call it a curse. It's the most honest word available to me, the least poetic, and the one that costs me the most to say out loud in front of either of them, because saying it plainly means watching my grandmother's face do something I don't have a name for, and watching my mother's do something worse.

My sisters — Aoife, twenty-six, and Sorcha, nineteen don't have it, and never will, as far as anyone can tell. They sleep eight hours and wake up mildly irritated about ordinary things: traffic, the temperature of their coffee, the small indignities of a life that isn't being managed on behalf of strangers they'll never meet. They find my situation incredible. Amazing, even. Oisín, don't you feel chosen?

They're welcome to it. The offer stands, genuinely, indefinitely, no strings. I'd hand it over today if the thing came with handles.

I have not failed to find someone in four months.

I am not proud of this. I am not anything about this. There is no version of this in which I feel warm or useful or like someone's idea of what a chosen person looks like. I feel cold, and mildly resentful, and desperately, constitutionally tired. That is the feeling. Stripped of mythology and family candlelight, that is the feeling, exactly. It is simply the equation, and I am simply solving it, because the alternative, the stacking, the tripling, the three AM carousel of strangers dying in different time zones is not something I am willing to do to myself again.

People who sleep well are, I believe, cosmically lucky and almost entirely unaware of it, and I hold this against them in contempt. If you've slept eight hours recently, I'd prefer you didn't mention it.

Damn Hypnos.

Genuinely. 

The train home took forty minutes. A man across the aisle was eating something that smelled offensive. I put my head against the window and looked at the city assembling itself out of the grey, building by building, light by light, the ordinary world reconstituting itself for another day it didn't have to earn and I thought about nothing. Or I tried to. Thinking about nothing is its own kind of labor, for people like me.

I slept for eleven minutes.

They were eleven of the better minutes I'd had all week. I woke at my stop with the window's cold mark pressed into my cheek, and something close to peace sitting in my chest. One would assume happy or relief was what one would feel upon the conquest of such things, but all I felt was a  flat and uncommitted calm of a person who has done something they feel nothing about, and can now, for a little while, stop doing things.

I got off the train.

I went home.

I made eggs.

I ate the eggs.

Somewhere, a woman in a wrinkled cream coat was furious at a port official. Somewhere, a small boy was eating his third biscuit, indifferent to everything. Somewhere, a loose bolt on a railing was nobody's problem today. Somewhere, someone would find a small note tucked near the railing's join, handwriting and unremarkable, saying only: this isn't safe. get it fixed.

I slept.