Nusleep

Life lost

I had a dream last night, that I was this cockroach-like verminous thing scuttling in the walls of my apartment. Walking through the pipes and drywall, through piles of dust, eating whatever I could find, however inedible. Always running away from rats or people trying to get me. I remember I fell asleep eventually and all I could think was that, "I was an unlovable thing, destined only for loneliness and disgust."

When I eventually woke up my eyes were covered with tears and there was a strange pain in my ear. You know that sensation of water being trapped in your inner ear canal? It was similar to that, but scratchy, and I could hear it as well. something moving inside of me, scratching.

Remember the infestation? Well, looks like it came back to bite me in the ass. So, still feeling disgusting and alone like a bug in the wall, I went online to learn how to kill a cockroach that's been lodged in your ear.

Apparently it's a pretty common thing when you have an infestation, mama cockroach will lay an egg in your ear. When the babies wake up they're little larvae, but eventually they grow bigger, and they get hungry.

Of course prolonged conditions like this can cause you to go deaf. Obviously, I didn't want that to happen, but thankfully I had just enough money left over to treat myself to a little hydrogen peroxide that I can just pour straight in my ear and kill the bastard.

     Life in that apartment complex went about as well as that first day.

It took a while to finally get rid of the cockroach, but I never truly got around to fixing the infestation.

Everything that I did after that, putting up little hotels everywhere and spraying my apartment with Raid up and down, was just a Band-Aid solution to the real thing that could've stopped it: i.e. hiring an exterminator to put an end to my misery. but at the end of the day I just didn't have the funds.

I was waiting for my raise at the end of the month, all the way back in April, to finally put my financial severity problem to rest. But, as you might tell, that never happened.

I kept falling behind again and again and now I was here, without any source of income. Maybe I could file for Social Security? or something else? but then I got the common cold, and after that all I wanted to do was sleep, and then another fucking cockaroach took up the nesting space in my ear again. It just kept happening, life kept happening, and I didn't have a good solution at hand.

pretty soon I became lethargic, just the belief that sleeping was better than facing the harsh realities of my life, had become gospel to me.

I thought multiple times about going outside, but why? What friends did I have outside of work? The work that I don't have anymore. What place could I go to where I could just let out all of this pain? especially now that I was sick and crawling with insects.

I got as many cleaning supplies as I could. if I couldn't feel good, and I couldn't be in good shape, at the very least I could smell good. It would have to do for now.

     A couple days into the common cold I went to a doctor to try to figure out why it wasn't going away. Apparently, and he told me this straight to my face, I needed "more bedrest and a lot of sunlight if I was going to fight off this affliction". I told him about my sleeping problem, that I'd either sleep too much or too little, and he actually recommended Nusleep.

Fuck that guy! He didn't even have the Nusleep look. He didn't dance on the somnambulant strings like the rest of them. He didn't look at me with that airy smile, with those almost vestigial eyelids. With that somniferous, sleep inducing, stare.