The Cold, or, Reasons never to pierce your nipples

At 1:58 a.m., The Coughs are attacking. This nimblest, most weathered brigade of my cold knew to save its onslaught until after dark, when the house is quiet, my zinc has been put away, and my defenses are lowered.

I've been trying to sleep for 3 hours. Consciousness seems to have settled itself comfortably into my mind, in no hurry to slip away tonight. Trying to arrange my limbs into poses so comfortable that they trick my brain into dozing off, I've spent the last 172 minutes restlessly turning onto my side, looping my arm over my eyes, bending my knees, stretching out flat, crossing my arms over my chest in the dark--almost like an insomniac yoga routine.

Then The Coughs came. They're the unstoppable kind, where once the cough takes hold of you, it grips you and bends you double. They're the show-off kind, too--they sound impressively ominous, like what I imagine it would sound like if I had the Black Lung (keep in mind that it is 2 a.m., so I am feeling melodramatic). But I imagine that my Cough had a serious Stage Mom in its formative years ("louder, honey! No, more pathetic. Yes, like you're dying. Think pain. Better.")

I once took a dance class with a girl who claimed to be a real-life insomniac. Not a semi-insomniac, like my ex-boyfriend, but a true insomniac, one who almost never sleeps. She was a medium-height girl with short, wavy, dark hair, square shoulders, and a jaw that always seemed to be a little bit clenched.

She told me that she never slept. I sympathized (we were both college-age, so I figured she meant it theatrically). No, she says--I mean, never. Seriously? Yeah, never. What do you do instead of sleeping? I do yoga for 4-6 hours every night when everyone else sleeps, she replies--but I can only sleep an hour or so at a time, and not every day. Wow, I say--that's crazy. Then she asks me to imagine my life as a series of little square boxes, all neatly lined up end-to-end, and to imagine that each box represents one day in my life. Ok, I say. Then she says, now imagine that all the lines in between the boxes suddenly collapse, and all you have left is
one...
...big...
...long...
...box...
...stretching out forever and ever until you die.

I also remember one day in the locker room, as we were changing for class, she told me she had gotten her nipples pierced earlier that week. After class, stripping off her clothes, her leotard caught. There was some yelling. I remember thinking, 1. Dear god, no matter what happens, I will never, ever pierce anything below my chin, and 2. well, it serves you right for wearing a leotard a few days after you pierce your nipples.

But yeah. I'm glad I'm not a real insomniac. This sucks.