The pills I take make me sleepy; they make me snore through the jingle my phone

plays at ten-minute intervals, vain attempts at waking me. The bitingly minty menthol in my toothpaste doesn’t rouse me from my coma. I doze on the M20 that takes me past my old studio, on the way to my new studio in the three-walled cubicle of an HVAC sales call centre.

I drowse as a pubescent man admonishes me for unmet quotas and abject caller

rapport; then snooze through twelve more clicks of prematurely ended cold calls. The last

one asks me if I use the brand-spanking-new auto-cooling pollutant-free smart air

conditioners I tout. She buys into my mumbled somniloquy about how it lets me sleep like a newborn.

Flickering fluorescent lights fail to disturb my dormant eyes as I push a squeaky

trolley through empty supermarket aisles. The beeps from the self-checkout as it scans my dinner-for-one, can of grape soda and declined credit card don’t wake me from my reverie.

My quiescence is unaffected by the ding of the microwave as it announces the

successful resuscitation of the Thai-style chicken satay flavoured jasmine rice. The food

stays half-eaten, grey and insipid, spurned by a tongue deadened by my prolonged stasis.

I rest on the soft memory foam, unconcerned by her imprint on the left side of the

bed, where she had claimed the ventilation hit just right. I sleep through the delayed bullets from before she left, each round piercing my flesh with an ugly squelch, but somehow missing my vitals. They strike somewhere unseen, obscured in the fuzz of

somnolence, wounds for my conscious self to heal.

Occasionally, I wake with rheum-crusted eyes and a damp pillow. I wake to swallow the pills that allow me to gently fade back into a dreamless slumber, where her existence is irrelevant.