When

Sleep won’t come. And won’t come. It’s like this: you’ve
opened the door to it, as to an expected guest, and it’s
standing there on the doorstep looking straight at you;
but it just won’t come in. You’ve stood aside to let it
through, you’ve invited it into the house of
consciousness—that shack—but it won’t take the one
step over the threshold necessary to bless you with
oblivion. You wind up eyeballing each other for the
longest time. You actually get to know sleep pretty well
that way: all those creases around its eyes, for instance,
and the implacable smile. You can even guess (like
you’ve got all night to speculate) what it’s thinking. It’s
thinking…about…something else entirely.

4am. Sleep is a foreign country; they do things differently
there. The bastards.