Around two in the morning I am still awake. I cannot say how many times I have been pulled out of sleep by a sharp, sudden noise. Falling asleep has never been simple for me. On a good night, in a quiet room, it takes about forty minutes. On a bad night, it can stretch past an hour. That is why I go to bed at eleven: so that by midnight I might actually be asleep. For a young person now, keeping any kind of early bedtime is not easy.
I have put an absurd amount of energy into this. Before I even open my eyes in the morning, I am counting the hours I got, checking whether I went to bed early. If I did not go to bed early, or did not sleep long enough, I turn on myself. The fixation on sleep duration has become a kind of demon. I trace it back to nine years of shared dormitories. From middle school on, I slept and woke alongside other people, and I also picked up the habit of a noon nap. Staying up late probably began there too. A group of girls would hold a nightly tea party, chattering about who liked whom and who disliked whom, then drift off in a good mood. I liked that atmosphere. I liked the noise, the company, the feeling that friends were close by every night. We had no electronics then, so we slept when we were sleepy, sometimes for an entire day.
Time is cruel. Later, for reasons I still do not understand, everyone began doing things at night—things that could easily have been finished before bed, but were left until after lights-out, when they were done in a rush. The hour moved later and later: eleven, twelve, one. I could hear all kinds of noise. The liveliness I had once loved stopped feeling lively. Those sounds became wooden mallets hitting my head, keeping me awake and heavy at once.
If the noise were purely mechanical, I could ask someone to lower the volume. But people are complicated, and in a small, square dorm room, those complications have nowhere to hide. I am not clever about this. My heart is mostly straightforward. I do not want to guess at other people's thoughts or interfere more than necessary; I try to manage my own part. This probably comes from the education I received. I am grateful for the school culture that shaped me into someone who would not easily be disliked, that cultivated character instead of letting exam preparation swallow everything. A Japanese scholar is credited with the idea of not causing trouble for others, and it was also a phrase our middle school principal repeated. I have kept it in mind.
Some people object: doesn't that turn everyone into an island? Aren't relationships held together by small troubles people create for one another? Maybe. But a person is ultimately an individual. How many people actually stay with us until old age? Not troubling others does not mean cutting ties. It is precisely because we are independent that we can meet others well. A normal need for connection should not count as trouble. Communication is a skill, though, and I have never learned it properly. Language often feels pale. After saying the same thing many times, I go numb. The desire to communicate drops, and the whole thing becomes a dead loop, like stagnant water giving off a smell that makes me sick.
Where do I go from here? Sleep remains a problem, a trouble I have not solved for most of my life. I keep pinning my hopes on leaving this environment for some place I imagine, which is escape, or perhaps a prayer that time will fix it. Either way, I let it be. A friend once told me not to worry: there is no need to sleep long before death, because after death comes a long rest. It is a convincing line. Then I think of the heavy bags under my eyes, the dull skin, the resentful face I wear while shuffling down the road like the walking dead—today every step feels like it lands on cotton—and I panic. I am afraid I will not live long enough to see myself white-haired. I often think how good it would be to stay alone, quietly, in some corner forever. Of course, that day can only come after death. Once a person reaches the afterlife, there should be no sound left to hear.