I'm seven or eight. It's late at night and I'm getting ready for sleep at my grandmother's house at the beach. When the lights are off and the window blinds are closed you can't see anything. My sister and I are talking and then my step dad appears at the door, and brings a piece of newspaper to me. In the image there's a face that looks like a skull and it's screaming. The legend says something about car accidents. I'm so overly terrified that I start crying and I keep crying for maybe 30 minutes, till my mother finally comes fetch me and lets me sleep with her.

It's nearly 1 am and I am battling my chronic insomnia so I can finally get to bed and have a decent face when I wake up for school. I lie in bed with eyes closed for a long while. As I'm finally drifting to sleep, the door bell rings and I'm the only one that will get up to open the damn door. Step dad is waiting there and he won't even say good evening when he gets in, and when I tell him that it's time that he gets a set of keys already he just says that he never will.

It's 4 pm and I am terribly sleepy. There's no way I can keep reading whatever I'm reading without taking a nap, specially when I've always had trouble with staying awake in the afternoon, so I lie in bed and sleep. The nap ends up being 3 and a half hours long and when I wake up my head feels heavy and dizzy. Seven hours later, my eyes are prickly, but every time I turn of the lights and try to get to sleep I feel more awake than ever, and have to keep doing things.

I'm lying in bed and I feel reasonably tired, so I might fall asleep soon. But as I'm lying there I start thinking, and it's not long before some really interesting idea pops into my mind and I'm sure if I don't write it down, it'll be forgotten in the morning. So I turn on the light and start writing... and I don't stop...

This is why I don't go to bed early.

Etiquetas: ecos de otros, en inglés, querido diario, retrato familiar