04.04.03 - 5:50 a.m.

it happened so quickly. i thought i was getting the stomach flu again. My insides so quesy i was scared to turn over, it was like that again. i said the prayer that father gave us to say during lent, "Have Mercy on Me Lord Jesus Christ, A sinner." Breaths in and out, in and out, in and out, the first six words breathing in, the last three; out. I was saying this prayer and tryong to pay attention to my breathing, to calm down, to calm my stomach. Too many cigarettes? i thought i might have stomach cancer...why have i been sick so much recently? Why this stomach ache all the time. i decided i would put my cigarettes on the table in the break room tomorrow, today, i would put them on the table so that someone else could have them, maybe this is a sign. Breaths in and out and in and out. I cant sleep. I turn the light on, i read one and a half short stories, i realize as i am halfway through the second that they had already made a movie of it and i knew the ending. "The Bedroom..." something about an anguished father at the death of his son. I was reading that and all of a sudden it was all familiar. I knew from the movie that i must still have several pages. I decide i am tired, i decide to try and sleep. I am on page 89 i remember that and turn off the light. I decide on hail mary's and change my mind, its a long prayer and after awhile i forget what i am saying, it doesnt mean anything and i am thinking about one thousand other things. I think i might take a nap on jeffs couch tomorrow instead of eating lunch, maybe i will have an apple, who would wake me up though? Everyone at work, he wouldnt want to publicize his couch as a napping area, but tomorrow i would need it with this little sleep and the medicine. I would ask as a favor i would try to make sure he was alone. I am praying again, trying to clear my mind, trying not to think about the couch, about the nap, about my hair when i wake up from it. I try to think of nothing, to think of the black screen that helps me sleep. The pinball arm that scoots away thoughts of my fifth birthday thoughts of a man behind my bathroom door. Thoughts like this i shoo away with a 9 word prayer taught thousands of years ago. I try this prayer in and out and in and out. I think about sinners and how archaic that word has become. How no one uses it anymore. How no one refers to anyone as a sinner, how i have grown up around it all these years, how i use it to chase away ill intentioned demons. I clothe myself in it in case there is someone under my bed. I know with those syllables on my tongue i am safe. I was taught this. I think about those nine words i count them on my fingers and i breath in and out and in and out and in.

And then, i feel it. My body electric with sleep at my skull making its way through my scalp through my eyelids under my tongue. Ive never felt it before. Sleep this immediate. And then, i thought i was dying. I thought i was dying. I thought this is what it felt like.

I had no unfinished business. Everyone i loved knew i loved them. I thought that anoop would print out the last entry and send it to my mother in an envelope and she would open it and she would fall to her knees. I saw this. I saw anoop sealing it with his tongue. I saw the way it would appear on paper. The diaryland font gray and incomplete in her hands. This was all so fast. I had said goodbye. I thought my last entry was intentional. Thanking God for everything that i had, thanking my family, my friends. They would have this at least. At the most. Its more than most people get. Its all happening in the on fire seconds it takes me to realize that i wont wake up.

And im sitting up in bed. Searching for someone, im terrified. I imagine though, if it was someone to take me that i would feel peace, i had always always imagined that i would feel peace. I am sitting up in bed and the electricity is in my fingers, in my wrist. I think that my shoes on their tree is a man in black. I wont believe that he is the one that will take me. I think about my mom, my brothers, and i have words on my lips that im not ready. That i cant leave. That im not ready. It occurs to me that i dont have any say in the matter and the man in black is real and i am terrified that it will happen this way. I am ready for someone in white, glowing to stretch out her hand, i am ready for this but i am terrified of the man behind my tall dresser.

And the worst part. I lie back down and stare at the ceiling. I lie back down and i say my nine word prayer and i wait for the light in the sky and i wait to hear my father making coffee. Its only 5:30 i have an hour and a half.

I want to wake up my mother and tell her. Its still all around me. My heart is beating so hard into my ribs, the ones in my back, in my throat, in my head. I feel like i am no parts but this beating. And there is light in my window now. This is all i need on any other night. This is all i need is one thin strip of midnight blue and i can close my eyes and the man behind my dresser is nothing but the stretch of a tall set of drawers and the shadow it makes. Right now though, i know, that dawn wont stop me from dying. And it wont stop anyone from coming from behind my bathroom drawer. And making that terrifying walk to the edge of my bed. That man, lifting long legs over the edge of my bed quickly while im fumbling for the light. I finally click twice and my room is full of impotent, watery light. Nothing that will stop the end of my life. Nothing that will keep mom from that envelope.

I thought if i woke to tell mom that when i climbed the stairs to my room bleary eyed from tears that have started and continue that he would be waiting for me and i would die and her last thoughts would be of my words and how she could never never surpass that pain.

Outside, now, the world is waking up and i dont feel better. Other nights headlights crawling across my ceiling was enough to soothe me. Other nights the finest line of gray bleeding into the black meant that i could close my eyes. That i had no need of vigilance, that i was a girl in a safe neighborhood, asleep. This morning i feel so scared. I feel like tonight will be the same thing. I have invented something that doesnt leave with the dark corners of my room. I have made something that stays, that is beyond my imagination.

I cant keep doing this. Being terrified of my own space. Molding every creak of my 100 year old house into a man waiting until my breathing evens out. Im so normal most of the time. But there is something in me that is capable of breathtaking terror. The kind that has me fumbling terrified with the light above my head, ripping my body out of sleep to race around my empty room searching out the glimpse of someones head ducking back into dark. The useless 40 watts of my lamp against whatever monster it is that has me sitting up in bed terrified, frozen in fear underneath my sheets, waiting. The seconds pregnant with their potential.

I was scared. I thought of my husband. I was angry, i was angry that i was to go in terror. It seemed so unjust. I waited for a peace that i had never known, a peace i thought would accompany this moment. There was none. There was my mother and there was my grave site with the kind of clouds that speed cameras capture. Violent and mechanical and lighting quick. Gray and then pale; mountainis and then flat like steel. And the grass so so green. Not like anything you might see.

This was four seconds. It was just awful. And its here still and i wait for the house to wake up but i fear it wont help at all. I fear, somehow, that i have alerted my fate that i might not make it any further, that now was my best time to go.

I was so angry at that. I was so angry. To feel my body going. If i was to stay asleep. If i was to keep my eyes closed i would have conceded. It was that clear. It was a fight. A fight. My heart beating though the souls of my feet. Nothing but that ringing in my body and a struggle. Like i have never felt.

This is the only time this has happened. Terrible moments when i would wake up to rustling blinds in my bathroom and fear that someone has slit the screen while i was away. But this. This was nothing like i had felt before. I am not sure that if i tried to go back to sleep that it wouldnt happen again. I am terrified it will happen again tonight. I want to sleep downstairs. Downstairs takes care of the man behind my bathroom door but it cant take care of my own life.

I know i will have to talk myself out of this one. Without the aid of headlights on my ceiling, without the aid of that one breathtaking scar of blue. This is something that is standing behind me as i write. This is something i fear will follow me to work.

I want so much to sleep. I want so much to stop this. I want to sleep sound. I want to stop waking up at 4 am to write to you because i am too afraid to stay in bed. Because i am too afraid not to share it, expose it to the light. Reveal it. Some nights it helps. This night i dread the next. Will this go away today? I need this to not follow right behind me. I want to hold onto the feeling i had of being so lucky and blessed and fortunate without suffering the consequences of its immediate loss. Even if it is in my own head.

It was so real. I wont be able to tell you. My words fall achingly short. I keep glancing out of my windows into the daylight, into mothers walking their children. Into a near steady stream of traffic on the street. Yet the air is foggy and dreamlike. It isnt a sky i know. It is a spring sky with a winter veener. It is fake. It is cruel. It is something that will keep me from closing my eyes and giving in.

Ill move through this day with no sleep. Ill try to be normal. Ill try to laugh and not cry and not tell anyone that i am so afraid of this day turning into dusk.

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