I had such high hopes. I took some Benadryl before shutting off the light. I took the children’s Benadryl, the only one we had in the house. I let the viscous red liquor slide into my mouth, pretending it was a magical elixir. It felt ritualistic. Then I lay down and waited for the effects. I felt my hands get heavy first. It was the most delicious sleep and it was coming and my arms were splayed open to accept it.

At some point I woke up and looked at the curtain and decided I’d slept until DAWN! And that, unfortunately, wasn’t the case. It was about 2:30 and I’d been once again robbed. I spent some time on my phone. I tried to go back to sleep. Then, a sharp pain on my head, in a new spot, had me worried it was a seizure, so I popped a Lorazepam. I asked J to check on me after a while (meaning he was up too). The pain went away, but the sleep went away too.

The pain went away but we’d started talking and I went back into roid rage mode, taking J to task for not telling people how they can help him. I’m trying to be his pimp and find basketball game nights, people he might want to play music with… but it needs to come from him and he doesn’t have a ton of energy to devote to finding people to do stuff with right now and I called him a stubborn mule several times and finally shut up. The narcotic had minimal effect as sleep aid, maximal effect in turning me into Nightmare Spouse.

This morning, while stumbling but determined in the kitchen to make myself a kale omelet before all the kale went bad, I went a little woozy from lack of sleep and said to J, “I think I might fall down flat on the floor here.”

To which he clumsily replied, “How can I help?”

That produced for me an image of him trying to knock me flat to the ground and I told him and we spent 20 minutes cracking up.