After a bad night’s sleep, nobody likes us. The sleep which deserted us took with it something that made us human. We feel a latent irritation that even seems to imbue the inorganic air around us. It’s we, after all, who deserted ourselves; it’s between us and us that the silent battle of diplomacy is fought.

Today I’ve dragged my feet and heavy fatigue through the streets. My soul has been reduced to a tied-up ball of thread, and what I am and have been, which is me, forgot its name. I don’t know if I’ll have a tomorrow. All I know is that I didn’t sleep, and the confusion I feel at certain moments imposes long silences on my internal speech.

Ah, the huge parks enjoyed by others, the gardens familiar to so many, the tree-lined paths where people who will never know me walk! I stagnate between sleepless nights, as one who never dared to be superficial, and my meditation is startled awake like a dream when it ends.

I’m a widowed house, cloistered in itself, haunted by shy and furtive ghosts. I’m always in the next room, or they are, and trees loudly rustle all around me. I wander and find; I find because I wander. Ah, it’s you, my childhood days, dressed up in pinafores!

And during all of this I walk down the street, a wandering sleepyhead, a stray leaf. Some slow wind has swept me off the ground and I drift, like the end of twilight, among the details of the landscape. My eyelids weigh heavy on my dragging feet. Because I’m walking I feel like sleeping. My mouth is shut as if to seal my lips. I walk the way a ship sinks.

No, I didn’t sleep, but I’m more myself when I haven’t slept and still can’t sleep. I’m truly I in the incidental and symbolic eternity of this half-souled state in which I delude myself. One or two people look at me as if they knew me and found me strange. I’m vaguely aware of looking back at them, with eyes I can feel under the eyelids that rub against their surface, but I’d rather not know about the world’s existence.

I’m sleepy, very sleepy, totally sleepy!