The blinds let me down every morning. Accomplice to the sun, they cut me open in thick segments across the comforter, progressing in calculated slivers, leaving shards of me up the covers, to my face.

I lay there, freshly sliced, haphazardly arranged across a metal slab of soft promises disguised as a midnight oasis. Accustomed to the daily ritual, I prepare to pour the leavings of myself – a strange brew – into the day, having only recently . . . dropped off, “. . . of what?” I wonder, checking myself for imaginary fractures and feeling deconstructed.

On a good morning I’ve slept intermittently in two-hour stints. On others, like last night and the last two, I answer to the blue glow of my equally sleepless tribe while I nibble on the remnants of the day, living a recurring nightmare of self-cannibalism. Needless to say, morning by morning, I am consumed.

This bed, my “once and future” king no longer satisfies. Broad-shouldered as he is, he no longer holds me the way I need to be held, and leaves me feeling unsatisfied and alone . . . unsupported and chilled at the irony of feeling uncovered amidst a cloudy bundle of well-appointed bedclothes. Even this offering of comfort fails me.  What I wouldn’t give to be moon-shined, inebriated with sleep.

Through the fog of my own cloud, I seek sustenance in the marrow of the currant day emerging, as it pinks a swollen sky into a rouge of rising action. The incessant light, shoos away what’s left of the blackened refuge of my bedroom. I sit up, peel back the sheet as if it were a skin, wincing slightly at the mere thought of the pain of its removal, feeling quickened by the inevitability of my nemesis rising.

Swept up in the melodrama of my sleepiness, I am Eve, ejected from the garden and suddenly aware of my own nakedness. I am a princess nightly molested by an imperceptible pea. I am sunned down, dawned on – a vampire enduring the open-mouthed kiss of a warm-hearted sunrise.

Sobered by the lateness of the hour (6:30 AM) and the limited efficacy of my dog’s incontinence medication, I pull my fearfully and wonderfully made, spared parts together and stand directly on the undulating, slightly nauseating, incessantly humming pulse . . . of mourning the arrival of the sun. The standing, itself, is not entirely straight, as my morning posture is a lesson in human evolution. In a fine bit of ironic symbiosis, my motor skills require the sun’s warming, just as surely as the sun insists upon my rising.

Obligation trumps deprivation and the stumbling begins as I go about the noble completion of four daily, herculean labors: Disarm the alarm system. Let the dog out. Feed the dog. Extinguish the porch lights. The very patient, unseen lady on the wall is paid good money to talk me through it, “Disarmed, ready to arm . . . Front door . . . Garage door . . . Side door.” Although “garage door” is the most death-defying feat, as steps are involved, each stop on my journey ritually extinguishes a last chance at evening and, therefore, at sleep. I shuffle back to the bedroom while Rosie audibly gulps her food and follows me, her hero, with her eyes as I head back to the bedroom.

This morning, though tattered, I am grateful. Tonight will be the fourth night. I (almost) always sleep on the fourth one. The collective exhaustion of three un-slept nights leaves me numb, like a folded limb that has suffered the weight of something for so long that it craves the flow of blood and embraces the inevitability of unfurling and release. “Lord, just help me get through this next twelve hours of living dead,” I think . . . out loud, whispering through a row of gnashed teeth.

It feels odd to make up something with which I don’t feel finished – prettying a lie, but I make the bed anyway, with surgical precision; perhaps to prove that morning has broken, but not broken me. Survival is, appropriately, the next order of business.

The same feet that shuffle around the bed, supporting an untreated, obsessive compulsive need to ensure the equidistance of each side of the sheet, also carry me to “the edge” – the span of carpet that gives way to the hardness of tile – the literal transition. By the time I feel the first cool indication of ceramic under my toes, I am only five steps away from salvation. Having taken up my bed, I stand at the edge of the water and claim my miracle.

Fifteen to twenty blissful moments later, I return, baptized, ritually buried and reborn, “out from under” – effectively saved. Thanking God for ablution, I inspect my own hospital corners, checking for imperfections, tugging the bed-skirt, ensuring that the designs are perfectly aligned; the pillows evenly fluffed and rightly positioned – an assertion that here lies the perfect place for sleeping. Every morning, without fail, I spot and straighten a wrinkle that threatens the perfection of the scene. Truth be told, if I fail to make the bed on any given morning, I obsessively make it before climbing in that evening. “You sleep better in a well-made bed,” my mother always told me as she ironed the sheets and pillowcases into sublimely smooth submission.

I back out of the room, eyeing the pillows and their respective covers, thinking to myself, “Shams, indeed.”