December 31, 2014 |
I once woke up with a mysterious black eye. I have no idea where it came from. Most people will say that it’s because I most likely blacked out and simply have no recollection of punching myself in the face, or of walking into something. Well, what else could it be? Unless I face-planted my pillow, but seeing as they tend not to be filled with rocks, I don’t think that there would be much of a trace the next morning. The thing is, though, I didn’t black out.
As hard as it may be to believe, I was sober, for longer than an hour two, due to some stupid fad-diet thing that, after the second day, drains you of your will to live and leaves you fatter than you were two days earlier. The kind on which you are not able to drink, and so, not only have you decided to starve yourself, you have to do so yourself while sober. I never understood why they didn’t have fad diets at Guantanamo Bay. They would break a “terrorist” faster than blasting Barney the Dinosaur at them for hours at a time. Every five-year-old knows that Barney does not work.
Anyway, the whole black-eye thing has led me to conclude that I am a sleepwalker of sorts, or at the very least, a sleep self-harmer. Though unlike conscious self-harmers, my unconscious self likes my self-harm episodes to be displayed on my face, for everyone to see. And there are only so many times you can say you walked into a door before people start whispering about abuse behind your back, even if the only person abusing you is you.
It even makes you consider taking up religion, preferably one where you get to cover your face. But to be honest, I’m not sure it would work, seeing as you can still see the wearer’s eyes, unless you go down the full-on burka route, and then there’s every chance the things might get banned anyway. And there’s also the problem of travel. Go to France, for example, and the privilege of covering your face in public will set you back €150. Maybe it’s just better to wear a hat with some sort of veil attached to it. Or maybe it would just be easier to channel Amy Sedaris and pretend to have been beaten up by someone else, and when people ask if you’re okay, respond by saying, “I’m in love, can you believe it? I’m finally, totally in love, and you know what? It feels great.” Because who is going to believe the truth anyway? That you punched yourself? Say that to a random person and watch them edge away slowly, dialling the nearest institute that will strap you into a straitjacket and throw you in a padded room. Needless to say, Sedaris didn’t actually punch herself in her sleep. Sedaris was wearing make-up.
The black-eye thing was a one-off – that I know of, at least. Who knows, maybe I’ve punched myself in the face before, but with less impact, but I have to admit that I was weirdly impressed that I could throw a punch that would result in a visible injury, and on myself no less. And I slept through it. Discovering that sort of thing about yourself fills you with a strange sense of confidence. When approached on a dark street, for example, by a group of youths, you no longer scuttle to the other side of the road, but instead stride past them with confidence, safe in the knowledge that you really do have a killer right hook. Danger becomes something that you laugh in the face of.
The self-harm thing would probably also explain the many mystery bruises I wake up with on a daily basis, which would only lead one to conclude that sleepwalking sometimes happens, too. On a more regular basis than I know of, at any rate. This is the thing about living alone. In the same way that no one will know when you die until they smell you many months later, you will never know if you’ve sleepwalked or not. Yes, there might be a new mystery bruise, but is that from banging your leg into a table the night before? Until there is someone who can witness the walking, you’ll never know. And even then it would probably help to sleep talk, too, as how else are you going to wake the other person up so that they can witness you moving around while unconscious? You could sleep punch them, but nobody likes a violent sleepwalker.
Apparently sleepwalking and sleep talking is hereditary. Which would seem to make sense in my case. At least in terms of sleep talking. My father sleep talks. And seeing that I seem to take after him in almost everything it really shouldn’t come as such a surprise that I do, too. He once famously sat up in bed and asked my mother to leave the house immediately as her kind was not wanted around here, and then told her that if she refused to do so he would be forced to call security and have her escorted off the premises. Which kind of made me wish we had security just to see if he would follow through. Instead, my mother told him to fuck off and turned over. But then she always has been the sort of person whom, if you told to leave somewhere before she was ready to leave, would probably have to be carried out. So I guess he knew how to make a threat. Albeit an unconscious one.
My favourite unconscious activities, or so I’ve been told, because it would seem that I have some sort of routine, are talking, at length, mainly about shoes, because despite the fact that I only ever wear trainers, it turns out that I am a secret shoe fetishist. So secret that even I didn’t know. And then there’s the peeing. Not in the bed – I do not wet myself – but I physically get up and go to a bathroom to pee. I also sometimes pat people in a comforting manner on the head, like you would a dog or small child, and murmur “there there” at them. I then tell them to be quiet and go back to sleep. Freud would have a field day with me.
There are probably more of these incidents, but seeing as I live alone, unless I install some sort of CCTV camera, I will never know. And as tempting as it might be to install a camera to see what happens – because I can’t help but feel, for some strange reason, that my night-time life is probably a lot more interesting than anything I get up to in the day – whether or not I want to watch myself lead my mysterious second life is another matter. But it might give me the answer to why my legs always look like I have just emerged from a serious car crash. So covered are they in bruises, if you were to just glance at them and then be asked what colour I am you would confidently go with purple. I have seen myself, well my doppelganger, being killed in Halloween H20 more than once. It isn’t pretty. And that involved hair and make-up of sorts. I am not blessed with a photogenic face. Watching myself would break me. In fact, it does: every time I watch Halloween H20 I am broken. I’ve also seen that film more times than I would ever care to admit.
By Natalie Dembinska
