Tired

A young woman was exhausted. She hadn’t slept in weeks.
 
She was so tired, her hips ached. She was so tired, she imagined seeing things and wondered, occasionally, whether she was truly awake or asleep.
 
Her doctor was no help. He encouraged her to eat a blander diet.
 
“How bright is your room at night?” he asked.
 
“Not bright at all.”
 
“You need to quiet the voices in your head,” her doctor suggested.
 
So the young woman listened for voices in her head, but she didn’t hear anything. She put a sign on her door, begging people please not to knock. She gave her cat away. She only ate potatoes — she didn’t even salt them. Chewing was a chore.
 
She was so tired, the blood refused to move in her veins.
 
She was so tired, her memories stalled.
 
The cat came back — it mewled, ceaselessly, outside her window. The young woman didn’t care. She wasn’t sleeping anyway. She put the potatoes in a bowl and left the bowl for the cat, wondering if cats ate potatoes, wondering if she’d even heard the mewling, or if she’d imagined it, too.
 
She was so tired, she felt reborn. Newly birthed. Or, at times, like she’d been viciously assaulted — bludgeoned and choked, and left in a heap.
 
She slipped outside the margins of my story.
 
I wear her weight like a heavy yoke. When I blink, she blinks. When I press down on the keys of my keyboard she winces, a sound like tearing, like ripping. It pains me — I think she knows this. She is remorseless. She grins a terrible grin.
 
Sleep, sleep, please sleep