I have regained my ability to sleep. Or, more accurately, sleep has returned to me. On Monday morning, I woke up suspicious. Not only have I appeared to have slept for more than six hours straight, but for the first time in a while I felt so weirdly, truly rested. I closed my eyes, awaited the labor, but I went on breathing normally, without sound that reminds me that I have lungs. I wasn’t, in other words, awoken by struggle. I wanted to cry. Outside twittered the strong-lunged Xavierville birds that have been keeping me sane since moving here. How routinely do I tolerate difficulty until it is status quo. Out of what–fear, fatalist intransigence, laziness. A belief that any pain you can wait out. For a month or so my body has forgotten that breathing shouldn’t be an exertion–a virus or other that I suspect I picked up in December, w/c had made my asthma worse. But even before that, for what must have been at least a year, the usual cocktail of mental distress and physical frailties has made sleep scarce, a fugitive, impotent, robbed of its ability to repair and renew. This has wreaked havoc on my thinking, my memory, my tiny life. That morning, what ought to be instinctive, a grade school science lesson on automatic processes, dawned on me w/ such oppressive clarity. Some things shouldn’t be so difficult. We accept the oxygen saturation we think we deserve. Etc, etc. On our way to the ER two nights earlier, I thought it was close to the end because I recall hearing the intro to ‘Dreams’ by The Cranberries. Thought the OST was going to be at least ‘Spiegel I’m Spiegel,’ sublime crotchet triads auguring the afterlife. I was beset by grief. I was just thinking how things were just turning around. I was just getting to an OK place. Life has just stopped being all-around unbearable. A string of more specific just’s: I just finished replacing all the harsh lighting fixtures in the unit, just bought a huge baul center table that I really like, just received the email that would get the ball rolling for the US edition of Y, just got paid after half a year. It reminded me of that reel of someone computing calories on their phone just before a nuclear mushroom cloud turns everything white and they close their eyes, a vague expression of peace. The next morning, a Sunday–I stayed overnight for observation–from the Parish of the Holy Sacrifice across the street drifted the sound of the congregation singing ‘Kordero ng Diyos.’ The brush-with-death aftermath has transformed everything into an exuberant OA expression of life. Maybe it’s the extra oxygen, my neurons being repaired toward buoyancy. Case in point: I had to put down It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over by Anne de Marcken after part one because the Bluets but make it zombie premise, its ironically lucid thoughts on hunger and the body, memory and being alive, were hitting a bit too close to home. Early in the novella, the narrator puts a crow inside her, ‘under [her] ribs,’ where she has ‘carved out a space.’ She thinks: ‘I have a crow inside me and no one can know. I can feel it all the time.’ Then a childhood memory, then nostalgia washes over her, ‘suddenly awake to the deviance available in every ordinary moment.’ I remember that while I struggled to breathe in the passenger seat that night, right next to me driving and keeping me calm was Om, the primordial inhale and exhale that created everything in the universe (also a lesson here about living close to friends if one lives alone). I am suspicious of this irony, but I am happy to be sleeping and OA and suspicious. Alive.