Time stretched out in my early morning dreams to the point that I was sure I was oversleeping by hours; it had to be past noon. But I opened my eyes and it was seven something. When I opened them again it was a little past nine.

It was a day of mundane tasks: head shaving, box opening, taking out the trash. The take a book leave a book. I perused the titles and opened up an anthology by school kids called “Growing Up in Park Slope.” In the middle of the page was a sort of prose poem about Grandma having a stroke. I superstitiously thought of reading something else before closing the book, something happy, but I didn’t. I left Raggedy Ann and Andy and Grisham and something else, taking nothing.

We didn’t talk too long about it. S. thinks a woman can’t win in America. Maybe but we have to try. 

I turned over unhappily in my abbreviated sleep, the wake up time of two-thirty looming over me, an oppressive, inescapable force. Then when it happened I was fine, not even really tired. 

It occurred to me while reading by the pool today that I never realized womb rhymes with tomb. Am I the last English speaker on planet earth to discover this?

I fell asleep very briefly and woke up breathing fast, adrenaline flowing, fight or flight. I examined my surroundings. Sun, attendants in polo shirts and khakis. The looming concrete facade of the hotel building set against a partly cloudy sky. All was as I’d left it a minute or two before. I picked back up the book.

I awoke gradually, hearing the radio play dimly over the air conditioner. Some tune or other and then a voice intoned: What is jazz?

I stay in bed through the six-thirty news read by Gary, or Bob, can’t remember now, one of them’s the DJ and the other does news. When I hear their names fresh out of my dreams they’re obvious and recognizable but in later, lucid hours it’s all a blur somehow.

It ends with the scores and weather. And when a tune starts up again that’s when I rise.

I lay in bed in the middle of the night with my eyes open and my knees up, the way you do when you know you’re not possibly going to sleep. I thought about how I get this way sometimes at night and I know it’s bad but I can’t help it. I could get dressed and take a walk around the block. I could turn on the little reading light and read. I could curl into a fetal position on the kitchen floor. All seemed like equally bad options. And a few hours later I woke up.