On more than one occasion…
you have told me
you forget to breathe
sometimes.

When did you realize
this was literal
and metamorphic?

When did this
metamorphsis
occur?

Transmutation/translation/transaction.

What does
a breath
cost you?

Why does your breath
accost you…

This past Wednesday I picked up an oral appliance to treat my sleep apnea. Given that I have been on the record saying “I’m tired, but I’m always tired” since undergrad, I have likely had sleep apnea for a nontrivial amount of time. Waking up tired. Constantly drifting in and out.

I remember in high school, I had biology sixth period I think sophomore year, and I actually had to ask my teacher if I could stand in the back because otherwise, I’d fall asleep at my desk and I earnestly wanted to learn things.

I remember the only time I intentionally pulled an all-nighter. It was not even for an assignment due the next day. It was for something two weeks out. The thought process being, I get the bulk of it done during the unexpected lull I had that week, and then I could refine it. I wrote that paper and I reasonably proud of the paper and the end result is that that paper got like a D or something and the head of the Biomedical Engineering Department had the gall to pen “I take it you’re not a native English speaker.” I took that paper to various tutors who said something to the effect of “no, your paper is written well although perhaps not written in the from of a scientific paper.” I would later redemption years later, as I repurposed that essay for a graduate level class and I got an A+ on it. Perhaps that is time timing, or time doing something else.

There are several things worth staying up for. There are several memories that only happen because you push past the veil of sleep. Now, do I feel necessarily feel comfortable recounting all of these stories? God no. Some stories aren’t mine to tell. But I can tell you about 3AM poetry cyphers in a Wendy’s parking lot. I can tell you about hunting shooting stars in twilight hours. I can tell you about red eye flights and waking up in a different timezone, almost a different person.

I’ve kept a poorly maintained dream journal in my personal discord. Sometimes I dream often. Sometimes, I don’t dream coherently for vast stretches of time.

I never finished the PS1 era game 40 Winks.

I devoured the entirety of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman comics and still think about Vol. 8 - World’s End.

I even watched the second season of Netflix’s The Sandman even though I knew it would probably be the last meaningful way I engage with Gaiman’s corpus because people are unfortunately terrible sometimes.

I also ended up watching Netflix’s In Your Dreams, which is a perfectly fine movie that I probably won’t watch again, but there is something to be said about the recognition that you can’t let fantasy obscure reality.

All this to say, in order to dream, you need to sleep and perhaps even sleep well, and at the urging of my dentist, I went to a sleep doctor and found out I did in fact have sleep apnea and I got this weird appliance with fins and bumpers that keep my jaw from collapsing my windpipe. And the fear was gonna be like that tumblr shit post.

I had been recording my sleep with this snore tracking app so I had a reasonable baseline of what it was like. So on Wednesday, I slept with the oral appliance and it wasn’t like night/day difference, but it was a marked improvement. There was significantly less haze and fog and I felt more awake and less tired and this was after one day, so god knows what will happen the next day and what will happen with different configurations.

Which you know, giving one’s self rest is perhaps the best way to end the year. And yeah, it took so many words to get there, but if you’re reading this, you’re here for the journey and less so the destination.