Here's One From the Lazy Days of Summer

My goodness. It seems like the day starts right before it starts to end. Where does it all go? Down a hole? Is there a reserve somewhere, and a stringent distributor? I always lie in bed at night, having pushed as far into the morning’s hours as my body allowed, with the taste in my mouth of not having enough drink to wash down a dry bite. Turn up the glass to get the last drop, concentrate the flow, swallow with steady force—and it’s still not enough. A cruel proximity to satiation. And then I drift off to sleep still dry-mouthed, I awake in the morning, sit down to a long wooden breakfast table at the other end of which is seated a man silently snickering behind the blind of a quivering newspaper, and the maid who refills my unwashed glass with the exact same amount of liquid as the day before seems only a little better at hiding her hilarity. I try bargaining, sometimes pleading with her for more, but she scurries off quickly, somehow embarrassed before my confused inquiries, her seams about to burst from the tension of her restraint. I swallow slowly, satisfaction escapes around the bend of an imperfect angle, and then—off to bed. That’s it. Nobody looks me in the eye. And I never get anything done.
Wake up, brush teeth, eat breakfast (an illogical order recognized here), book, store, home, lunch, phone a friend, regular exercise, lethargic languor, hazy words on the printed page, pitiful attempt at creativity, and then off to bed…still thirsty. And feeling like my day consisted merely of carrying out those dull daily prerequisites for experiencing life’s true substance. I’m perpetually preparing to live. A sigh is all that comes out when I pose for prayer, and my words haven’t had time to simmer to moist divinity. I spend a moment hoping that God knows what I mean, and then somnolence sneaks up from underneath and kicks me into the reflective waters. That was another day—and here I am, with two sad paragraphs and eight to ten fingers’ worth of alphabetical buttons.
And every night I’m revisited by the recurring dream of being blessed with insomnia.