I have always very much enjoyed reading until I fall asleep. When I was younger and I understood the meaning of “a good night’s sleep,” I would sit in my bed with my nose in whatever book I was reading that week until I got to a good place to stop, and I would mark my page and turn off my light and curl up and wander off to dreamland. In high school my nightly readings usually consisted of texts that had been assigned to me, and now that I’m in college I’ve finally been able to get back into my habit of reading books that I actually want to read before I go to sleep. However, due to my recent and unrelenting lack of sleep and my resulting half-zombie existence, I’ve become pretty bad at staying awake while reading at night. I’ll be immersed in the plot, my eyes feverishly scanning the pages faster and faster (don’t fall asleep yet, don’t fall asleep yet, you need to turn off your light and put your book away so don’t fall asleep), and then I’ll start to notice how very soft my bed is, and how sleepy I am, and my eyes will start to roll around, and the next thing I know it’s 4:00 in the morning and the sky outside is light grey and my lamp is on and burning hot and I have a couple lines of text smudged onto the cheek of my sleep-sweaty face. This is when I grumble at my own tiredness, my eyes aching from being half-open for four hours of unsatisfying snooze, and turn out my light before rolling out of bed and onto the floor and pulling myself up to put on slippers and go to the bathroom. The halogen light is too bright, and I stare blearily at my reflection: two bloodshot blue eyes, a slightly sweaty philtrum, some Times New Roman imprinted on my cheek. I run the water until it’s warm, and I rub half-heartedly at the words on my face with the heel of my hand - I learned a long time ago that just going back to sleep with part of a book on your face makes it about twenty times harder to clean it off in the morning. Once my face is prose-free, I shuffle back to bed and I’m out like a light as soon as my head hits the pillow. I awake feeling unsatisfactorily rested, one of my cheeks rubbed pink, and I can never remember where I left off in my reading. This happens to me nearly every night these days, but I don’t ever really seem to learn.

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