The Text Was Fine. I Was Not Fine.

It was 11:47pm and I was still awake. Not studying. Not doing anything productive. Just lying there in my sweatshirt running through a two-sentence text message like it was a final exam I hadn't studied for.

Here's the thing about having a crush when you're tired: the tired removes your better judgment. Normally I can clock when I'm reading too much into something. At midnight in May, apparently, all bets are off. I'd read it seventeen times. Maybe eighteen. The words weren't changing. The subtext I was looking for was not in the text.

I ended up sitting at my desk for a while, notebook open, not writing anything.

the notebook open, the pen untouched, the mind very busy

Just thinking. That specific flavor of thinking where you know you should go to sleep, you know sleeping would solve approximately seventy percent of the problem, and you continue to not sleep anyway.

lights on, brain fully online, sleep optional apparently

I've been a little scattered lately, head full of fall semester stuff, the blog, the running schedule that fell apart the second the weather got nice enough that everyone made other plans. Adding 'quietly short-circuiting over a person' to the list felt very on-brand for this particular spring. I did eventually sleep. The text was still fine in the morning. I was fine in the morning. Turns out the problem was 11:47pm the whole time.