I was a little monster as a baby. I sometimes kept my mama up all night and
all day. The doctors could explain the crying—it wasn’t much more than a
normal baby’s—but they couldn’t explain why I never went to sleep. Except I
was crying more, because unlike most people, nothing could stop me.
According to her stories, she hired a nanny to take shifts. She could have
raised me on her own if not for my little peculiarity. As I grew up, I
started figuring out how to express myself through other noises besides
screaming, but I never did learn how to sleep. In my school, the younger
children would take naps. The teacher ended up moving me over to the
bookshelves, and gave me a little reading lamp, so I could keep myself busy.
I wasn’t the only one who needed the extra accommodations. A boy in my class
also didn’t need to nap, but in his case, it’s because he slept all the way
through the night. I called him my opposite, but my mother noted that a true
opposite would be in some kind of coma. There’s just something different
about the way my brain works that makes it so I don’t need any sleep to
function. Not only that, but I can’t sleep at all. I’ve never done it even
once, which is sad, because the whole dreaming thing that people talk about
sounds positively fascinating. I asked the boy to tell me his dreams, so I
could live vicariously through him; which is a word we learned through a
book that had no place in that classroom. He said he couldn’t remember his
dreams, but the next day, he was able to regale me with his stories. He said
just wanting to remember them made it so that he now could. Years later, he
would admit to me that this had been a lie. He had come up with the stories
on his own, because he didn’t want to disappoint me. That was so him, from
start to finish.
College was difficult for me, because the schoolwork was so easy. Well, it
wasn’t easy, but I had more time to study than the other students. Everybody
hated me, but it’s not like I was an overachiever. I was just bored, and as
much as they liked to party, at some point, they would have to go to bed,
and I would still be up, so I had to do something to pass the time. I
tried to have a roommate my first semester, but that didn’t work out,
because I would disturb her sleep, and that wasn’t fair. Once the boy and I
were married and living together, my situation saved us a little money. I
was able to be productive for more hours of the day, and hell, he only
needed a twin bed. Anyway, my coworkers were as jealous as my classmates.
It’s just that I found it easier to do my paperwork in the dead of night
when the hemisphere was asleep, and not work so hard during regular business
hours. Then came the time for us to grow our family, and I was hesitant,
because there was no way to know what kind of child would come out of me.
Would they enjoy the same benefits? Would they have some kind of corrupted
version of it that left them tired all the time? I didn’t think we could
risk it, and my husband was okay with that. We chose to adopt instead, which
was no problem, because there are so many other good reasons to adopt. We
went to the agency to submit our application, and after some time, we were
selected for a child who we were told required special needs. For reasons
they couldn’t understand, this little girl never slept. Obviously, we knew
we had to make her part of our family. I mean, who better than me to raise a
woman like that? It was decades before science progressed enough for us to
take a DNA test. Wouldn’t you know it, she was an exact match. I mean
exact. I still don’t know how, but she is my twin.
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