Anna Isaac

Now, I’m not sitting here crying into my pick-me-up, but I can feel the sleep coming and there still isn’t time for it.

These days I line up the beverages. Morning – Coffee, Evening – redbull, pre sleep- G&T.

‘I’d love to, but I’m just too tired, too much work.’ This has become my mantra and I hang my head in shame. What happened to my keen (borderline desperate) self of the start of term? I’m starting to get more that a bit pissed off at myself. I used to at least have the pretence of a work/life balance.

There comes a point when you are torn between two possibilities. Do I get at least most of my work done and have a bit of sleep?

Or shall I be what Cambridge terms ‘naughty’. Do the absolute bare minimum of work, and get absolutely no sleep. Why do we work so fucking hard? So we can get a high-powered job and spend the rest of our lives working really fucking hard? God, when did being young get this exciting?

Twice this week I found I’d bought something I have never wanted or needed with the entrails of my overdraft. Only to then hurriedly return it, and be met with the perplexed face of the Topshop cashier: ‘Weren’t you here half an hour ago?’

In my head all I can think is, ‘Half an hour? Was I in River Island? No… Maybe that was the faculty.’

That was Monday; Tuesday was worse, when she asked ‘didn’t you buy that yesterday?’

Why is it that as soon as interesting opportunities present themselves I’m buried in work and rather than gagging for it, I am gagging for sleep?

I have friends demanding to see me: WHERE ARE YOU? ARE YOU IN FUCKING HIBERNATION OR SUMMIN’? (Sorry for that dropped G, I don’t mean to imply that my friends aren’t all beautifully spoken and amiably middle class, just that they adopt an ironic tone for texting effect.) I end up feeling rubbish for being a crap friend.

It doesn’t matter how much I fill up my loyalty card at Nero’s in the attempt to stay open-eyed, or how fit a proposition could await me of an evening, all I want is sleep these days.

Benedict Cumberbatch could be lying on my bed; unclothed, playing my violin, telling me I’m much more sexy than the naked lady from that other episode… and I’d just ask him what the time is, as I twitch nervously wondering which essay to half do next. I’d possibly also ask him to put my violin down. He doesn’t really know how to play it does he.

All this is bad, but today I reached the sad sad point when I started laughing, for no reason, by myself, at something in the reduced section of Sainsbury’s.

Then a fresher (who barely knows me) from my college asks me ‘… Anna, are you ok? You look a bit out of it?’

This really is a new low. FINE, fine absolutely fine I say, trying to give my eye-bagged-bobble-hat-wearing-dead looking self a jaunty air. I determinedly grabbed a scotch egg, nodded and trotted off. I hate scotch eggs. What a fucking nightmare.

Tuning out

Like being asleep yet awake
An elongated moment in
A temporarily idle mind,
Semi blind and full of
Thought dust.
It buzzes with a low note, a pitch that slowly resonates,
Not quite loud enough to bother
An inattentive ear.
How the fuck
Did I end up
Here?