i am beginning to wonder how the narcolepsy works on my already busted sense of time. i mean, if i simply can’t set sleep aside for the proper time, and if this is not an indication of actual exhaustion or engagement, then it must contribute to my inability/refusal to run on schedule. When i warn someone i’ve newly met about it (the episodes are rarely dramatic, but i will zone out and i will probably seem to be awake–i might even be stuffing my face or walking–but i am indeed unconscious; my nervous system is shot, so i shake when i’m angry, etc.), his or her first question is almost always, “When did it start?” i honestly just don’t know. i’ve always liked to nap and fallen asleep at inappropriate times, but i’ve also kept irregular hours for my entire adult life. i stay up late. i wake up early. i nap a lot. i worked too much while i was pregnant. Food turns me into a zombie. Are these symptoms of the narcolepsy, or are they the things that provoked it? i am embarrassingly inept at math. After a full cup of coffee, i often wake up face-down in my book at coffee shops. i’ve woken up many times on the subway with my book on the floor in front of me–notecards sprawled everywhere and my pen rolling down the car. i am always at least 5 minutes late. Lately, in the afternoons, Jonas has been yelling “OPEN!” at me when i start trailing off and my eyelids drop. At night, reading stories to him, i randomly start ad-libbing, and he corrects me every time i make a mistake, snapping me back for a second.  Many nights, i come in late and head straight for the fridge. i wake up a few hours later, a bag of shredded cheese or chips in my hand and my body stretched out like a crime scene on the kitchen floor.

This is all compounded by the fact that i don’t kill time: i practice a serious dedication to nostalgia. When i began my dissertation, i wanted to organize it around a preoccupation with what i called “productive melancholy”–a sort of permanent refusal to mourn or to ‘get on with it’. If heteronormativity is a mournful response to queer possibilities, then what would it mean to not let go of those supposedly unfortunate desires in favor of a succinct timeline? Instead of the one on which everyone graduates on time, never takes incompletes, gets their shit together early enough to have several kids, and always negotiates for the most lucrative job, what other life narratives will do? What would it mean to let go of professional advancement? Is it really for everyone? What gets lost in the turns, when only the family gets reinforced as the ties that matter, and semester after semester of students become so many piles of term papers, co-workers become some kind of Fordist cog, and work is always practically designed to produce the most surplus value? Is there a different economy to the time my body has decided to occupy?

Cathy Caruth suggests that one indication of how time is not simply a repetition of beginning, middle, and end, of signs that signify and mean once and for all, is trauma.  Trauma figures the way an event might not signify in its initial moment of enunciation, but its effects might be legible only much later, and even as legibility becomes possible, progress doesn’t. It happened, it didn’t/couldn’t mean anything/mean yet. Time passes, and meaning becomes not only available, but more aggressive and repetitive. For Caruth, this is also an argument about history–if time flows in multiple directions, then the question of “what happened” is hugely complicated.

As for what happens, is it possible to not be goal-oriented in our feelings–romantic, erotic, intellectual, and otherwise, or is this just another narcoleptic question, straight to REM, no stage one or four of sleep?  Narcoleptics hit the ground running with their dreaming. As soon as they nod off, dreaming begins–often giving them the hallucinatory sensation of reality.  i am protective and impractical of letting go. i “waste” a lot of time on feelings and attachments that will not ever, “Go anywhere.”  Feelings seem just as real as, well, what else is there? Once, before my narcolepsy was diagnosed, my Mom sent me to a medical empath.  i walked into the room and sat down, and she asked me how i was feeling. She asked me to talk about my family, and after a minute or so she said, so who is this guy? Her theory was that there was someone from my past who  i was so attached to, and/or who was so attached to me, that i was allowing it to destroy me physically–they call it being “corded” in the biz. What’s weird is that i hadn’t mentioned any guy.  She gave me her card and told me to call her when i got back to New York if i wanted to commit to shaking him loose. i never called.