Clean up the puddles of blood red banana ketchup on the dining room floor if it’s already 1 am and you still can’t sleep

It takes up so much time and energy you’ll be sleeping sweet and sound before you know it. Unless you just quit your job and you have rats raiding your pantry. How did I come to such a random realization, you ask? Why not just count imaginary sheep jumping over white picket fences like any self-respecting insomniac? Well the story goes this way. As I am beginning to write this, it is nine minutes before 1 in the morning and I’m still awake, tossing and turning on my bed, stuck between tomorrow and today. I’ve had a lot in my mind the past few days (and nights) and I have had some trouble sleeping. Perhaps because in the past few weeks I had been working at night and sleeping during the day, and just when my tortured old circadian rhythm was finally beginning to adapt to the sudden change, I surprised it yet again by quitting my job and trying to sleep at night again. I imagine my internal body clock must be so confused and irritated and exhausted right now it might as well just break down into pieces and stop ticking altogether any minute now.

Or maybe I just can’t sleep because of all the noise I keep on hearing. I had to get up just now to get a glass of cold water. Maybe it will help me sleep, I thought. My mother turned off the dispenser so I get to quench my thirst with a glass of wonderfully refreshing lukewarm water instead. I visit the toilet several times to try and dispel and exorcise whatever inner demons I might have curled up inside me that are tormenting and poisoning my system. I stare down at the toilet and I see nothing. Still, I feel bad. But at least now I know for certain it is not my stomach or some precious part of my alimentary canal that is upset.

Then I hear something break and smash. From what little evidence I could see I reckon the turn of events went something like this. Another one of those large, pesky domestic rodents I had been campaigning to protect from my father’s pesticidal tendencies had betrayed me again and tried stealing food from the table. Instead, it ended up bumping into a bottle of banana ketchup and sent it falling into the dining room floor. The culprit disappeared. The mess was like a horrid murder scene. I had to clean up the blood red puddles of banana ketchup, carefully feeling the sticky dressing with my bare fingers for shards of broken glass that might have been buried and might get left behind for an innocent foot to accidentally step upon one of these days. My fingertips are still a bit red with all the ketchup I got them into. I remind myself to buy a new cabinet or something, as my container of clothes is now full to the brim and all the clothes I leave around just lying in my room are in great danger of being viciously attacked and preyed upon by these ungrateful, pillaging rats. If only my old cat were still alive, I thought, these thieves wouldn’t be as brave in intruding our house as they are. Then again my old cat wouldn’t have stood a chance against that gigantic monster anyway. It was almost the same size as her and would have easily killed her if it wanted to. It was so large just seeing it crawling there scared me with morbid thoughts of dying from the bubonic plague.

I go back into my room, still wary of that giant rat. I caught it crawling back up the table but couldn’t bring myself to so much as shoo it away. Anyway, it scampered off into the darkness again, and I’ve no choice but to go back to bed with the hopes of finally getting some sleep. If ever I do get to sleep I hope I don’t get nightmares. It is well past three. As usual, without apparent reason, the dogs are restless outside (like me), breaking out in scandalous barking marathons every other twenty minutes or so. Speaking of dogs, if I were one I’d be dangerous and chances are I would’ve already ended up in a stinky, cramped dog pound somewhere. The problem with me is I seldom bark or growl. I just bite when I’m already pushed too far up against the wall. And after I bite I run off and hide, never to be seen or heard from again. That was exactly what happened when I received my insultingly small paycheck from the office last Thursday. I exploded, and with that, whatever little enthusiasm I had left for the job went flying out the window. It was like discovering a fly happily swimming in my bowl of soup just as I was half through with it and completely losing my appetite to finish the rest of the meal. Hopefully the little scene I made got my message across. And they will be more careful next time.

Already I am beginning to feel bad about having to resign from my job. I had been working there for eleven months now, and over time I’ve come to love what I was doing. But I had to do what I had to do, and there’s simply no turning back now. The trouble when you’ve already established a certain routine is that you don’t think, much less worry, about the near future. Tomorrow does not bother you. You know exactly what time to get up the next day, what to wear, where to go, what to do, who you’ll see, what time you’ll be through with the things you need to do, what time you get home, and so on. There is very little room for pondering on uncertainty and hesitation. And yet, when that routine comes to an end, say, when you graduate from school or, in my case, when you quit a job, you are faced with so many questions you had little time to even think about back when you still had your schedules and itineraries all planned out. Right now I have all these doubts swirling in my head. But I know there is no reason to fear tomorrow. At least I’ll have the time to drop by the grocery store and buy another bottle of banana ketchup. And maybe some rat poison too. Maybe not.