That is how I woke up. My face and head pressed against a wall, darkness, sheets and blankets felt unfamiliar. “Where am I?” I whispered, half-expecting a woman’s voice to answer. It’s been like this a few times over the past year but today was different. I was not in a near-stranger’s bed. It seems I had slept violently again, as I am known to do. The safe side of the mattress was a country away. Getting there required mattress-ready acrobatics, as the blankets and sheets had formed a solid entanglement. I have no memory of how this configurement occurred or what demon summoned it. When I thought I had found the safe side of the bed I was not wrong, but I was upside down, feeling like a Kafka clown. Early morning strangulations of this sort are common for me. I may exert more energy in the opening salvos of a day than I will for the remaining 16 hours of sentience, to say nothing of the energies spent whilst thinly sleeping. Upon siding myself up from down I found, to the pounding of my heart, that it was only 6AM. A decent wake-up time for a Wednesday. My workweek is now Friday-Monday, and I rise at 4 or 4:30am those days. Keeping a reasonably consistent sleep routine matters now. I guess it always did but I did not care. I got to the shower and stayed there for over 2 hours, masturbating and chatting with my kinda-gf. We’re still flirting with the possibility of being fuckbuddies but she’s in no mood. Healthy her whole life she suddenly has to go to a different kind of doctor almost every single day. Who has time for fuckbuddies when life is suddenly asunder… I read news articles and stared at nothing. Marveled at the hot water. It’s been an issue lately but I’ll not say anything unless it gets ridiculous. The landlord is not someone I like to interact with. He treats me like a child. His deceased son was the exact same age as me, which could explain the dynamic.

I found a notebook into which I wrote some stuff 10 years ago. I said something about feeling nostalgic for “MD.” I have no idea who or what MD is or was. I remember somebody saying that you never forget a woman you’ve slept with or had any kind of sexual encounter. I roundly disagree. I once chatted with a woman online for several days, questioning why she spoke with such familiarity and ease, as if we had done something great together. Only after 4 or 5 days did it dawn on me: Of course. It was on Greene Street, near Broome. I remembered the location on account of how each of the two streetnames conspicuously ended with a superfluous E. I always remember that encounter when I pass Greene Street but somehow I never think of the woman herself with whom it occurred. We had gone out on a few dates before but this was the night she dressed up and put on makeup and seemed to think we had something worth working on. I may have felt similarly. I don’t remember now. We had three other encounters on Greene Street and one at my place on 78th Street before it had to end. She moved back to Australia. Tasmania, to be exact. Only Tasmanian I’ve ever known.

But she was not MD. I’m still puzzled by this. Who/what was MD? Certainly not Macular Degeneration, which an errant LensCrafters ophthalmologist claimed I had. Mystery Deepens. There was one woman I knew whose initials are MD but no way in hell’s hottest kitchen would I have whacked sentimental for that trainwreck, and the timeline of our times together is too far gone from when I wrote about this mystery MD.

Further to my sleep violence I find that I have bruxed my way through a professionally crafted mouthguard. It was custom-fitted and 3D-printed within the last 3 or 4 years. It now looks like a shriveled, strangled snail. One end of it is completely chewed away, or maybe I bit off the end and swallowed it. My last use of it may have caused some bleeding, which is exactly contrary to why one would use such a device. Prior to this piece I had chewed my way through countless store-bought mouthguards, imagineering that a professionally fitted one would last forever. Forever is now, and if it’s been 3 years then at least that is considerably longer-lasting than any of the off-the-shelf pieces of yore. I’ll have to get it done again, I guess, if insurance will still cover it. I remember the dentist who did the fitting. She would stop repeatedly and tell me to swallow. Mucous, for some reason, kept pooling in my throat. She never said it as such but what else could she have been referring to…

I need to go somewhere today but I don’t know where. I’m feeling it again. When I start typing here, at this desk, on this spot, I get restless and irritable. I don’t want to be here. It’s not just that. I don’t want to be anywhere.