Other people when they have a sore throat and can't sleep: "I have a sore throat and can't sleep."

Me when I have a sore throat and can't sleep:

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It’s been 3:20 in the morning for ages. I haven’t slept in years.

I’m lying.

I slept 13 hours and 20 minutes straight through last night, after sleeping the entire day away to 3:20pm on my 32nd birthday yesterday.

There’s a rat in my throat. It’s taken a happy seat right in the middle of my esophagus. On a tiny folding lawn chair, if I had to guess.

This trespasser! This smug rodent bastard will not let me sleep.

In its tiny chair, it reaches back behind its head and scratches its tiny claws against the walls of my throat. It thinks the walls are too bare and gets to work hammering, painting, hanging things from strings and taking flash photographs to show its friends once I finally find a way to evict it.

Take a look at what I’ve done with the place, it’d say.

Is it finally happening? Am I going completely and utterly mad?

Since I won’t be getting to sleep anytime soon, I take to chatting with the rat.

A chat with the rat. I shake my head in resolve.

It has questions about desire and morality and intimacy and mortality and all the strings of humanity that connect them.

I told the rat that you can want everything, but you can’t have everything, and you can only get truly close to a few things, because there is only so much time for all these things.

It asked if I could pour some more wine down the pipe. I laughed and told it I was lying on a couch in an apartment in De Pijp as we spoke. It didn’t know where that was or what it meant. Never mind. Back to the strings.

We chat about the strings until we both hear the song we’ve written. Somewhere along the way, the strings became chords, and the chords became a tune and the tune became a story, the type that lifts you by your own strings and gives you no choice other than to dance.

And then I remember it’s a rat and it doesn’t belong here writing songs with me about humanness, and I think I’d better tell you about this infestation. This delirious train of thought.

You’d understand.

I’m sure you’re having trouble sleeping. Maybe you’re wondering whether I’m awake too. When I tell you about the rat, you’d make that face. The one you make when I say something absurd, but you want me to know you kinda like it and you totally get it and you won’t say it out loud but we both know you have similar trains running through your mind.

And I’d see all of this in your face, and you wouldn’t have to say it and I would feel seen. Understood. The opposite of a freak.

But I am here. So far away. And you are there. So far away. And we can’t talk. And no one gets it. And they’d all say it out loud that they don’t like it when I say things like that and no, of course they don’t have strange trains running through their heads or rats in their throats. And they’d look at me with faces that scream:

NO ONE UNDERSTANDS YOU! YOU! ARE! A! FREAK!

Exasperated and over it, all the years I’ve spent awake and misunderstood, I’d roll my eyes and whisper a begging query to the rat to scoot over, make some space for me. My eyeballs would roll back so hard I would fold inwards entirely until I was all rolled up into a tiny bit of nothingness.

And the rat in my throat would offer me a seat in a tiny folding lawn chair next to it. We’d sit in silence for a while. And I’d think of you.

Until I remember where I am. Where you are. What happened to me. What happened to you. And all the reasons why. How you disappeared midsentence. How the last thing I said was about oysters (god help me). And how fucking stupid it all seems now.

And we’d sing the song we wrote, the rat and me. We’d sing it so loud I’d lose my voice. Which is a very good thing because maybe it will stop me from saying more stupid things.

I’d scratch my nails against the walls of my throat, neither cage nor nest, just a quiet place for me to be myself.

And I’d nod my head, making a silent offer at conversation with the rat that says,

I like what you’ve done with the place.