Unawake

Another sleepless night. This is my seventeenth sleepless night in a row.  What I’m saying is not insomnia, because I knew that experience from university. I haven’t slept for seventeen nights. Not even once. Whenever I got in bed, I thought ‘right, let’s have a good night’s sleep’ but just like a reflex, my brain starts to get excited. I tried it all, to have a booze, melatonin, staying up late in the night, but all they do is just make my body feel heavier. My husband and son don’t know anything about my restlessness, if I say anything, they’ll just make me go to the hospital, and certainly they can only give useless suggestions. My life went on as always, farewelling my husband and children, then I’d go shopping. My husband is a dentist. He started his own business after graduating university with his colleague, so that they could share receptions and assistants. Both of them are talented at dentistry. With almost no support, the next month after their business started, the clients were already full, or to say it’s too full. Of course we should be gracious about that, many clinics shut down weeks after no clients. “It must be because you’re handsome that the clients come,” I said. Such an unoriginal banter. I said this because he doesn’t look handsome at all. His face is so strange, that I often get confused why I married this guy. His strangeness was so extraordinary that it can’t be described by words. His face has something that is hard to grasp,  but if I grasp it, I will comprehend this strangeness. But I can’t. One time I had to draw his face, but when I had pencil in hand, no matter how hard I thought, I just couldn’t remember the face of my husband. This shocked me. Like hitting an invisible wall while walking, leaving me no chance of what to do. 

But most people hold good feelings about him, it is necessary for his job. Even if he is not a dentist, he would probably still be successful in similar jobs. His voice is rich, speaking calm and composed, I never met this type of man before. Every one of my friends are very satisfied with my husband, and I indeed like him or should I say I love him, but I couldn’t say I’m satisfied. And he could always give a natural smile like a child, that is pretty rare for adults, and almost for granted, he had straight white teeth. “It wasn’t my fault that I’m handsome” we repeatedly make boring jokes, almost routinely, to check our existence. They drive out at 8:15, leaving the apartment parking, he would put on a Mozart or Haydn CD and hum the melody and start the engine. He slightly shifts his head and waved at the same posture that’s incredibly the same everyday, just like having practiced it. I have my own blue Skoda, the bumpers are sinked in, full of rust to shop everyday. After shopping I vacuum, do laundry and prep for dinner, so that the whole afternoon is free. I’d bring my swim togs and towels to the community exercise centre, and swim for around thirty minutes. I don’t quite like the act of swimming, it’s just I could not bear the wobbling fat. I always liked my sculpted physique, but never liked my face. My face doesn’t look bad, but I can’t like it. I liked to face the mirror naked, gazing at the round curvature, well balanced and I can feel there is something very important to me that I would not want to lose. How to spend the rest of the time is different everyday. Sometimes I go shopping in front of the train station, read on the sofa, while listening to FM or just lie to sleep. At dinner, the three of us would talk about how their day went. My child speaks the most, obviously, everything is very fresh and questionable in his eyes. He speaks, my husband and I exchange opinions. After dinner, my son would go play, watch tv or play with my husband. He would do homework when there was any, then at eight thirty, I put him on his bed, give each other a ’good night’ and lights off. After that, it was time for my husband and I. He’d lie on the sofa, reading news and chat with me. Talking about patients, talking about news. And then he would listen to Haydn or Mozart. I don’t dislike it, but no matter how long I listen to it, I just can’t hear the difference. I said as much to him, he said it’s fine, beautiful things are just beautiful, it’s as simple as that. “Just like your looks,” I said.” “Yes, just like mine.”  My husband said, then a faint smile. As if the mood was very flowing. 

This was my life, the one before I could not sleep. Everyday was similar repeats. I kept a simple diary, if I forget it for two or three days, I could not think which days were which. If yesterday switched with the day before yesterday it wouldn’t cause any harm. I often think, what sort of life is this! But I am not feeling a waste of time. I could just feel surprised, surprised that when I turn to the trace of my footprint, it is already wiped by wind. But currently, in time, I couldn’t sleep. Since I couldn’t sleep, I quit writing diaries.

I remembered the first night very clearly. It was a drowsy dream, a dream that is slimy and disgusting. I woke up in a climatic moment, came fully awake with a start, as if someone had dragged me back at the last moment of a fatal breaking point. Had I been immersed in my dream for a second longer, I would have been lost forever. I lay there immobilized, listening to my out-paced breathing as if I was lying still in a cavern. “It was a dream,” I told myself as I gradually calmed down my breathing. Lying stiff on my back, I could feel each section of my vertebra sinking into my bed, I imagined each section slowly dissolve in my bed, slowly forming another substance. My heart is working violently, feeling it pump to everywhere all at once. Then something in the side of my glimpse that caught my attention, a vague, dark shadow. I tried to lift myself to see it in parallel, but my lungs, my heart, my back just froze there, the impulse was delivered, but never retrieved, lost in a dark ominous hole that sent my signal to the other side of the planet. As I relaxed my muscles and gave up the urge to lift myself, the shadow slowly took a definite shape, filling the darkness with details. It was a gaunt old man wearing a slim black cape, this was no dream. This is reality. Now I saw that he was holding something, it was a pitcher,  an old fashioned black pitcher, and after a while, he raised the pitcher and started pouring the water down my knees. I began to worry that my legs were beginning to melt away. When I opened my eyes, the water was gone and an enormous amount of sweat drenched my clothes. The sheets soaked through, clinging uncomfortably to my skin, and yet I did not move. For a long time, I simply lay there, staring into the darkness, listening to the silence of the room as if it might reveal something to me if I were patient enough. I expected to hear something—a breath that was not my husband’s, a faint rustle of fabric, the quiet retreat of footsteps—but there was nothing. The stillness felt complete, almost deliberate, as though whatever had been there had already withdrawn itself entirely from this world. Beside me, my husband slept soundly. His breathing was steady and deep, untouched by whatever had just taken place. I turned my head slightly toward him, hoping that the familiar sight of his face might ground me, might confirm that everything was still where it should be. But as soon as I tried to focus on his features, that same strange absence returned. I could see him, and yet I could not. His outline was clear, the shape of his body undeniable, but his face seemed to resist recognition, as if it were something my mind refused to hold onto. I closed my eyes for a moment, though I knew sleep would not come. “It was only a dream,” I told myself quietly, but even as I said it, the words felt hollow, like something memorized rather than believed. 

From that night onward, I did not sleep. It was not insomnia in the way I had once known it. There was no tossing and turning, no gradual drifting in and out of shallow rest. Sleep simply ceased to exist for me, as though it had been removed from the structure of my life altogether. I would lie down, close my eyes, and remain fully awake, my thoughts clear and uninterrupted, my body alert in a way that felt unnatural. At first, I expected consequences. I assumed that after a few days my body would begin to fail me, that exhaustion would accumulate until it became unbearable. But instead, something else happened. My body grew lighter, almost sharper, as if some invisible weight had been lifted. My senses became more precise. I noticed details I had never paid attention to before: the exact rhythm of the refrigerator’s hum, the subtle variation in my husband’s breathing, the faint shift of light across the walls as the night passed into morning. During the day, everything remained outwardly the same. I continued my routine without interruption. I saw my husband and son off at 8:15, just as I always had, watching as he placed a Mozart or Haydn CD into the player, humming softly before starting the engine. His gesture of farewell—slight tilt of the head, a small wave—was unchanged, so consistent it might have been rehearsed. I drove my blue Skoda to the shops, bought groceries I did not particularly care about, returned home to clean, to prepare dinner, to maintain the structure of a life that no longer seemed to belong entirely to me. Yet beneath this routine, something had shifted in a way that could not be undone. Time no longer flowed as it once had. Before, days blended together, their boundaries softened by repetition and forgetfulness. Now, each moment stood distinctly on its own, sharp and separate. I could recall everything with perfect clarity: the exact arrangement of items on a supermarket shelf, the precise tone of my son’s voice as he spoke, the way sunlight fell across the floor at a particular hour. Nothing faded. Nothing dissolved. It was as though, without sleep, the mechanism that erased the past had stopped functioning. I began to suspect that sleep had not been a necessity, but a kind of mercy. On the fifth night, I stopped pretending to go to bed. Instead, I remained in the living room after the lights were turned off, sitting quietly in the dark. My husband and son slept in their room, their presence marked only by the faint, steady sounds of breathing that carried through the hallway. The apartment itself seemed different at night, as though it revealed a second existence once it was no longer being observed in the usual way. The refrigerator hummed continuously, pipes shifted within the walls, and occasionally a car passed outside, its headlights briefly illuminating the ceiling before disappearing again. 

It was during one of these long, unbroken nights that I first heard the sound. At first, I thought it was part of the usual background noise, something I had only just begun to notice because of my heightened awareness. But as I listened more carefully, I realized that it was distinct. A soft, irregular dripping. Water. The sound was faint, but unmistakable, and it seemed to be coming from within the apartment. I stood up slowly and walked toward the hallway, my bare feet making no sound against the floor. The dripping became clearer as I approached the bathroom. The door was slightly open, and I pushed it gently, careful not to disturb the silence too abruptly. Inside, the room was dark, but there was enough light from the hallway to see that everything was as it should be. The sink was dry, the bathtub empty. For a moment, I thought I must have been mistaken. Then I noticed the floor. Near the drain, there was a small, dark patch. Fresh water. I stared at it, trying to understand how it could be there. The dripping sound had stopped, leaving only the heavy quiet that followed it. As I continued to look, I became aware of something else—a faint trail extending from the patch, a series of uneven droplets leading out of the bathroom. I felt a subtle tightening in my chest, though my body remained otherwise calm. The trail continued into the hallway. I followed it. Each step felt deliberate, as though I were moving through something that had already been decided. The droplets led past the living room and toward the bedroom. When I reached the doorway, I hesitated briefly before looking inside. My husband and son were asleep, exactly as before. The trail ended at my side of the bed. I looked down. My skin was dry, my legs untouched, and yet I could feel something—an almost imperceptible sensation lingering around my knees. Cold, as though water had been there not long ago. I sat down slowly on the edge of the bed and remained there, watching them. Hours passed, though it was difficult to measure time in any meaningful way. At some point, my husband shifted slightly in his sleep and turned his head toward me. For a brief moment, I thought I might finally see his face clearly, that whatever had been obscuring it would disappear. But it did not. His face remained indistinct, just beyond my ability to comprehend, as if it belonged to something I could no longer fully perceive. I began to wonder whether the problem was not with him, but with me. Whether something essential had already begun to separate me from the world I had once inhabited. The next morning, everything continued as usual. “Good morning,” I said. “Morning,” he replied, his voice calm and familiar. My son spoke animatedly about something that had happened at school, his words bright and immediate, filled with the kind of energy that belongs entirely to the present. I listened, responded when appropriate, and performed my role without error. And yet, as I watched them leave at 8:15, as my husband turned and gave that same practiced wave, I felt something new settle quietly within me. It was not fear, nor dissatisfaction, nor even confusion. It was distance. A quiet, expanding distance, as though I were no longer fully inside my own life, but standing just beyond it, observing everything with perfect clarity and no real connection. And for the first time, I found myself wondering—not whether I would sleep again— but whether I still belonged to the world of those who did.

Writer – Max Mao
Editor – Lakshya Narooka
Artist – Grace Ye

–June 2026–