(no subject)
The neighbors are playing their music too loud. The neighbors always play their music too loud, some shitty hiphop. The kind where Megan can feel women being objectified just from the vibrations of the bass through the thin wall that separates her bedroom from what she gathers is their living room. Megan has her face pressed against the wall, even though she is sleeping alone in her queen-sized bed, and she can feel the wall pulsing against her cheek. She often piles the pillows over her head and presses her face against the wall, partly because the wall is cool in a way the other side of the pillow will never be, and partly because if she does this often enough, people will say she "just sleeps that way," and not that she withdraws from anyone or anything during the night. No matter how big her bedroom might be, she always pushes her bed up against a wall, and not a window, so that she can sleep with her face pressed against it.
She contemplates banging on the wall to let the neighbors know that their music is too loud, but she decides that the banging might do her more harm than the shitty hophop is. Instead she sits up in bed and waits a minute to see how hungover she is. She's lucky this morning - she has only a slight headache, and her stomach is fine.
She's supposed to have lunch with a friend at noon, she vaguley recalls, and the clock on her cell phone tells her it's only 8:19. Too early to get up, but she might as well. She was awake at 2:04 and 4:14 and 6:31, each time readjusting her pillows over her head and trying to name the 50 states alphabetically or count down from 100 or some other trick to help her get back to sleep. This happens every night, and what time she gets up is dictated by her eventual acceptance that it isn't going to work anymore and she might as well give up.
Without bothering to get dressed, wearing only a lacy bra and her frayed highschool gym shorts, Megan stumbles toward the bathroom. She pees, turns on the shower, and then perches cross-legged with her back resting against the bathroom door. She tells herself she'll only sit there for long enough to let the water warm up, but she knows that isn't true. She likes sitting there alone in the bathroom with the door locked, letting the air and the mirrors get steamy, knowing that her roommate and his coked-out girlfriend won't bother her, doing mental exercises that involve being along on a space shuttle bound for nowhere. By the time she gets up, strips, and tests the water with her fingers, it's lukewarm. She can't tell if she's let it run too long and the hot water is running out, or if it wasn't turned to a hot enough setting in the first place. Rather than mess with it, she takes a short, tepid shopwer, dancing in and out of the stream when her scalp or nipples get uncomfortable with the temperature.
When she steps out of the shower, she realizes that she's left her towel and clean clothes in her bedroom. She doesn't think her roommate or the cokehead will be awake yet, so she does only a cursory job of draping her gym shorts over her more sensitive bits before running through the hallway back to her room. Once she closes the door, she lies down, naked and dripping, on the small part of clear floor near her bed. She doesn't have the energy to properly dry off, and the book she was reading when she woke up one of those times is down there, peeking out from under the pajamma shirt she took off in her sleep because she was hot.
She reads for an hour or so, trying to laugh at Vonnegut's jokes, reading them in a whisper to herself as though that will help. She picks up her cell phone, starts a text message to her ex-boyfriend. "At some point there was a destination, but anymore we're just traveling."
She considers sending it, and then rolls her eyes and deletes it. She suddenly remembers that she has a stash of valium folded between the pages of a collection of Sylvia Plath poetry. She cancels her lunch plans via text ("Rough night, rain check?") and swallows two pills, ten miligrams, dry. The blankets are twisted from her tossing and turning, but the wall is still cool and the pillows worn in such a way that they stack over her head nicely. While she waits for the Valium to kick in, she softly mutters to herself "Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas..."
She contemplates banging on the wall to let the neighbors know that their music is too loud, but she decides that the banging might do her more harm than the shitty hophop is. Instead she sits up in bed and waits a minute to see how hungover she is. She's lucky this morning - she has only a slight headache, and her stomach is fine.
She's supposed to have lunch with a friend at noon, she vaguley recalls, and the clock on her cell phone tells her it's only 8:19. Too early to get up, but she might as well. She was awake at 2:04 and 4:14 and 6:31, each time readjusting her pillows over her head and trying to name the 50 states alphabetically or count down from 100 or some other trick to help her get back to sleep. This happens every night, and what time she gets up is dictated by her eventual acceptance that it isn't going to work anymore and she might as well give up.
Without bothering to get dressed, wearing only a lacy bra and her frayed highschool gym shorts, Megan stumbles toward the bathroom. She pees, turns on the shower, and then perches cross-legged with her back resting against the bathroom door. She tells herself she'll only sit there for long enough to let the water warm up, but she knows that isn't true. She likes sitting there alone in the bathroom with the door locked, letting the air and the mirrors get steamy, knowing that her roommate and his coked-out girlfriend won't bother her, doing mental exercises that involve being along on a space shuttle bound for nowhere. By the time she gets up, strips, and tests the water with her fingers, it's lukewarm. She can't tell if she's let it run too long and the hot water is running out, or if it wasn't turned to a hot enough setting in the first place. Rather than mess with it, she takes a short, tepid shopwer, dancing in and out of the stream when her scalp or nipples get uncomfortable with the temperature.
When she steps out of the shower, she realizes that she's left her towel and clean clothes in her bedroom. She doesn't think her roommate or the cokehead will be awake yet, so she does only a cursory job of draping her gym shorts over her more sensitive bits before running through the hallway back to her room. Once she closes the door, she lies down, naked and dripping, on the small part of clear floor near her bed. She doesn't have the energy to properly dry off, and the book she was reading when she woke up one of those times is down there, peeking out from under the pajamma shirt she took off in her sleep because she was hot.
She reads for an hour or so, trying to laugh at Vonnegut's jokes, reading them in a whisper to herself as though that will help. She picks up her cell phone, starts a text message to her ex-boyfriend. "At some point there was a destination, but anymore we're just traveling."
She considers sending it, and then rolls her eyes and deletes it. She suddenly remembers that she has a stash of valium folded between the pages of a collection of Sylvia Plath poetry. She cancels her lunch plans via text ("Rough night, rain check?") and swallows two pills, ten miligrams, dry. The blankets are twisted from her tossing and turning, but the wall is still cool and the pillows worn in such a way that they stack over her head nicely. While she waits for the Valium to kick in, she softly mutters to herself "Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas..."