Nights

     Sleep does not rest the body; medicine can do that.  It does not rest the mind; medicine can do that too.  What I’ve noticed sleep really does is rest the soul and the spirit from weariness.  Your physical energy can be replenished by science and medicine, but your spirit cannot escape the chronic weathering of time; simply existing for too long will tire it out.  When you sleep, you are escaping the day and “resetting” your spiritual clock for the next one.  Just like death and the afterlife helps us escape time, sleep  gives us momentary relief from it, and transports us to a new timeline.

     Before, the night was a boundless stretch of infinite time, ripe for use as long as you’re awake to use it.  Thus, I actually had one voluntary control over its otherwise unstoppable pull–choosing when to sleep, ending the day only when I wanted to. It could be as late as I wanted, since the night seemed so infinite…as though if I didn’t sleep, the next day would never come.

     I had all the time in the world—I just had to be awake to use it.

     I haven’t yet pulled an all nighter (which is quite a spectacle, being an IB student), but I’ve come pretty darn close.  Unfortunately, even the long, endless night now has its limit when the new day starts.  My one free, unlimited resource of time is no longer of value anymore, and I am truly a slave to the chronic pull of time.  Sure, I can still sleep…but it’s not quite the same, knowing and having experienced the truly cyclical nature of day and night.  Night can end, just like a class in school ends or the timer on a microwave ends when my Hot Pocket is done.

     The true implication of this:  if I procrastinate too much, I ACTUALLY won’t have time to finish my homework. 

     The new day and a new class period  will come, where before there was the endless night for me to do my work as slowly as I pleased. Time wasn’t stressful; I would always have enough, provided I didn’t sleep.  But now, I can feel the pressure every night as the hours tick away like seconds into the morning…and I still haven’t started my English paper.