silver crackling static

Last night at about ten-thirty, I shut off the light in my room at the Abigail and settled back into bed. And then about the worst possible thing happened.

I had a night terror -- one of those terrifying insomniac panic attacks that I thought had stopped bothering me in college.

For at least three hours I couldn't sleep; my heart thudded in time with the really annoying bass line blasting in from a nearby room. People seemed to be stomping up and down stairs, slamming doors, yelling, coughing, and otherwise making a ruckus all around me. At midnight I had some vodka. At one-thirty I put in my earplugs and managed to release some tension by crying a little. I must have managed to doze off, only because I saw the the binder clip fall off my outline and all the pages go flying around the room (including into the toilet); by the time I pulled it back together it was apparently 9 AM and the exam had already started. This was clearly a dream, therefore I had to have been asleep. Although I couldn't tell you how much rest I actually got.

The terror never quite passed; there's still a hard thrumming nugget of it stuck right between my lungs. I'm doing my best to breathe it out.

In a few minutes I'm going to pop out my Wi-Fi card, pop in my floppy, and kick up my exam software. Contracts starts in about twenty minutes and goes for three and a half hours. It could scare me per se if I let it, even if I weren't recovering from a panic attack. Please send me all the support you can spare, for the next four hours, starting now. Thank you so much. Thank you.

It will be over so soon...

thus spake /jca @ May 13, 2003 08:15 AM