I woke up around four and found my light still on, my face sticky with unintentional sleep and pressed onto the smooth page of a textbook. Now that I think of it, I'm not really sure what I'd intended. How is anyone ever really sure in that brief, sinking moment of "oh shit" that comes with waking and turning your eyes toward the clock? Maybe I'd intended to stay up studying, maybe I was nearly finished, maybe I had just wanted to rest my eyes. But regardless, I was dirty and exhausted.

Weeks like this, it's hard to turn my body toward the mirror at all -- to discover the length of my face, the glow gone from my skin, hardly any light in my eyes -- evidence of my disrepair under every ounce of skin.

I pulled myself from bed and set the textbooks aside, then crept into the bathroom for my nightly shower. Without looking, I removed my three, warm earrings, clamped to the upper bridge of cartilage from the weight of my sleep, then took down my hair and climbed in the shower, not bothering to pull the curtain closed. It's funny how robotic motions can be -- how things can pass so quickly, thoughtlessly -- how sometimes I fall so deeply into my own folds that I cease to exist, if only for a moment.

Shampoo, soap, conditioner, water, water, toothpaste, medicine, lotion. When you are this exhausted there is no voice that tells you to sleep. Bedtime becomes this idea that exists in movies with flannel sheets and bunny slippers, the way insomnia did with cigarettes and fluorescent lights before now. The bedroom becomes a cave, the bed just a more comfortable place to sit. Three becomes one becomes midnight becomes eight, until finally there is no sense in counting how much time has been lost or gained to idleness and sleeplessness and the romanticisation of said activity. Sentences lengthen, obligation fades, and finally I am just stumbling through classes and hallways, unable to communicate, the sentences too large to form and emerge, the obligation so small and apathy so oppressive that tests and worksheets pass across desks without regard, the week one long school day with a thousand, piercing bells.

When will summer ever arrive? Paris is all I think about.