Alex blinked her eyes open against the darkness, striking the alarm clock so hard that it nearly flew off the bedside table. She bolted upright in her bed, breathing hard and fumbling around for the lamp switch. When her fingers found it, she quickly turned it on. As she began to realize she was not, in fact, in her old law school apartment bedroom, but rather, in her current apartment bedroom 5 years later, her breathing began to calm. When she was no longer gasping for oxygen as a fish on land gasps for water, she rose from her bed and moved weakly into the adjoining bathroom.
The face that met her in the mirror was a frightening one: her pale eyes, wide with fear, were sunken into their hollow sockets, outlined by dark circles from night after night of sleeplessness. Her face was framed by her pale hair matted with sweat against her hairline, and her face was flushed to the color of her newly bleached sheets. Her lips, dry and cracked from her breathing, were as white as her face. Her first thought was that she dreaded going to the office that day.
It's Sunday, she suddenly remembered. No office today, and tomorrow is the start of a short week.
Thank goodness for that. Maybe next weekend, an extended one due to the holiday, she could catch up on her sleep.
Even as she thought it, she knew it was a preposterous contemplation. In five years, she had never for a single night slept as soundly or as peacefully as she had in the previous 23 years. But now it was worse. It had officially been three weeks since she had slept through the night, and it was getting old. It was becoming a daily game to figure out how to hide the aftermath of her nights from her co-workers. With each consecutive insomniac night, it was getting more and more difficult to hide the fact that something was not right. More people noticed every day, and tomorrow, for the first time in over a week, her presence was required at the precinct. She knew she would never hide something like this from Elliot and Olivia.
"Well, that's tomorrow's problem," she said aloud as she turned on the faucet. She splashed ice-cold water on her face and ran a comb through her hair, tying it back off her sweat-coated neck. She turned back into her bedroom, crossed to her bed, and looked at the clock for the first time since lying down the night before. As exhausted as she was, seeing the time only made her more tired. Two-thirty. "I got to sleep in today," she murmured bitterly. She could lie down again, crawl back under the covers, nestle into the crisp sheets, and try to go back to sleep. But she knew from experience, sleep would not come easily or peacefully. She might as well do something useful.
Tugging a sweatshirt over her head, she switched on the hall light and moved down the hall to the office just off the living room. She turned on the main room light, as well as the small lamp sitting on the edge of the desk. She could not have enough light when it came to being alone, whether it was the middle of the night or any other time of the day. She turned on the laptop that was still sitting open on the desk from the work she had done the previous afternoon. As it booted up, she padded through the living room into the kitchen, where she took a bottled water and a half-filled container of cottage cheese from the refrigerator. Snatching a spoon from the drain rack on the counter, she thought wryly of the irony that she never had enough dishes to put to use the brand new dishwasher that she would not have had time to fill anyway.
Sitting at the desk in front of her laptop, she set the water and cottage cheese to one side and spread papers across the empty space on the other side of the computer.
Three hours later, the words on the papers were swimming in pools of black and white alphabet soup, and the words on her computer screen were blurring like a poorly taken picture left out in the rain. Setting her glasses on the legal pad in front of her, Alex rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands and yawned. The empty water bottle and three others were lined up across the front of her desk like soldiers; her coffee mug had long since occupied the space to her right.
Pushing back in her chair, Alex rose and delicately set her glasses on her nose once again. She still had much to do, but her eyes and neck were desperately protesting against proceeding further without a break.
In the kitchen, she took a bowl and spoon from the drain rack, almond milk from the refrigerator, and a box of Cracklin' Oat Bran from the cupboard. She took the armload to the living room, where she set everything down on the coffee table before collapsing on the black leather couch. She grabbed the remote in her left hand and clicked on the T.V., while pouring cereal into the bowl with her right. The first fifteen channels were infomercials and early morning news, the two last things she was in the mood to watch right now. She finally found a channel that was showing Casablanca, her favorite old movie. Settling back against the leather pillows, she drew a quilt over her lap, and took a bite of cereal.