i drink coffee at 8pm. i love to look at the light up marquee across the street. i love to open my window and hear laughing children, revving engines, police sirens, and drunken gossip. i love to go outside. i love to dance. i love to figure out what to wear. i love to think about who will be there. i love to get cash at the ATM. i love the pounding beats of electronic music. i love to order drinks. i love to decline drugs. i love to go to the bathroom. i love to take pictures in the mirrors and stalls. i love to vomit in the toilet quietly. i love to be in the restaurant at 3AM. i love to order chicken fingers and Pepsi. i love to confess everything to my friends. i love to confess everything to strangers. i love to confess everything to the cashier. i love to ask questions about why im here. i love to go for long walks. i love to see the streets empty. i love to hear the quiet of the night. i love to sing to my favorite songs. i love to cry in bed. i love to go for a drive. i love to love others. i love to sit and spectate. i love to scroll on my phone. i love to watch cartoons in my underwear. I love to type on my computer.
i wonder why there are so many ways to ruin a night's sleep. it surely seems that experience supercedes rest in our human society, that work supercedes rest. When i was younger, i loved to sleep - it was my demise to wake up for school or wake up early on a weekend day for any reason. now as i enter adulthood i see the value of what i was doing much more, but i dont experience that same restfulness. i wonder how deeply these sleepless nights will bite me in the future. i have seen people in my own life subject to restlessness and i can see in their face how it affects them as time passes. surely the accumulated stress weighs down on you. but i dont feel that stress enough in the current moment...
im grateful to have not been disgnosed with a serious sleep disorder. much of the deprivation put on myself has been self-inflicted, and what is strange to me, more strange than anyhing else, is that i am completely fine with the adverse health risks of a sleepless night if it means that i get to have an experience. the experience has been crazy and cinematic, but the experiecne has also been quite banal. i remember challenging myself to stay uo for 24 hours as a child, and i think about how i wasnt DOING anything better than going to sleep. as an adult, i dont have to challenge myself to have the experience i was looking for as a child - there are many things you can do that will contest a night of resting.
this cloud of mystique around the night and the LIFE of nighttime has intrigued me for some time. what intrigues me is that the cloudiness of this lifestyle is hiding tired, weary faces. i wonder what a lifestyle would look like without any triggers to our sleep - would it be boring? what if humans were conditioned to sleep upon need as animals do? i wonder if it would be as exciting. i wonder if im confusing excitement for danger.
