Sixteen
Most days, I’ll walk to work, which takes about twenty-five minutes. I’ll follow a roundabout route home to add another ten or fifteen minutes to the walk. Being unable to run and limited with what I can do due to the damage to my right leg, walking’s one of the few things I can do as exercise. It also helps to spend some physical energy. Getting to sleep is never easy, but it’s always harder on days I don’t walk. Like many writers, I’m a tea-drinker. The schedule at work is regimented: it’ll usually be three throughout the workday (two in the morning, and one in the afternoon). Once I…
One
I always worry that death will be a restless sleep, that there won’t be peace, but a constant tossing and turning trying to find something that’s always out of my capacity to achieve. I’ve had sleeping difficulties all my adult life, so when I wake now, I’m unsurprised. I don’t know the time. My clock radio has an LCD display – I bought it years ago for specifically that reason: LCD numbers don’t glow in the dark, and don’t remind me of the time. That’s just one of the sleep strategies I’ve learned. Most of them don’t work. Nothing works for everybody, and, for various reasons, my head’s particularly resistant.…