Onramp

I've been tense and unsettled lately, and I have no idea why. My friend Emily calls it "fussy". Or my favorite, more elaborate description, "fussy in the head." I haven't gotten more than five hours of sleep in a night for the last three nights. Keep in mind, it's Sunday right now. That means that Thursday night, Friday night AND Saturday night, I've woken up somewhere between midnight and 3 a.m., with a body and/or brain that had apprently decided it was done sleeping. Which is, y'know, awesome. I've even been taking herbal supplements to try to even out my sleep cycle, and apparently my body is having. None. Of it.

So I'm a little foggy today.

And maybe that explains my overwhelming paranoia that I'm forgetting something important. Like there's imminent doom lurking over my shoulder. During one of my sleepless moments, I stumbled on a scenario that for whatever reason, seemed to capture this overwhelming tension that I'm right on the verge of fucking up.

You know those onramps onto the free way? There's an incredibly short one on my way to work. Overall, I feel like those moments where I'm trying to merge, but there's a car to the left of me, matching my speed. I try to slow down, just as she slows down to let me in. So I speed up, to pass her, but then she does too. And we're matching speeds and the onramp is getting shorter and shorter and shorter and...

...okay maybe that was a sort of sleep-deprived crazy dream/nightmare thing. But the imagery--I can't kick it. I don't know what's twisting me up in knots specifically. I don't know that anything is, really. I have a statistics test to give on Tuesday, and I was stressing out because I thought it was written and it wasn't and I don't know if I'll have enough time to get everything done on Monday so they can take the test on Tuesday and... what? This is not--should not be--as big a deal as it feels. Right? So why do I keep waking up with a buzzing brain that is just not going to be satisfied?

I think I just need to figure out if I'm supposed to be speeding up, or if there's any possible way I can just slow down.