Yesterday, I made a major strategic error. A nap.
Unintentionally, sure. But the road to hell is paved with good intentions and comfortable couches, and there I was, sleeping like a baby in the middle of the afternoon, flat on my back, no shame whatsoever. Two hours. Gone.
You’re going to say: come on, your body needed it.
Maybe. But you didn’t see what crawled out of the couch after.
Because when I nap, something shifts. I go into the couch a relatively functional human being and come out a creature. Like a bear at the end of hibernation, hasn’t eaten yet, Mr. Bear already on her case with his big springtime ambitions — and she’s got fangs, fur in full chaos mode, zero tolerance for anything that breathes. Or a cactus. The kind that grows in a forbidden desert, covered in inch-long spines, and if you’re unlucky enough to brush against it, it cuts you without even looking up. No warning. No mercy. No apology either.
That’s me. After a nap.
Nobody wanted to come near me. Nobody wanted to talk to me. Nobody wanted to love me, even charitably, even from a safe distance. The evening was grim. Flat. I grumbled about everything. The cat I don’t have. The floor, freshly washed, as it turns out. The ambient air.
I went to bed early anyway, small moral victory, but my daughter was out — the little criminal — and like any perfectly reasonable mother, I waited for her to come home, grumbling in the dark like the same old bear, the one who knows spring is coming but finds it takes forever.
The door. The goodnight thrown into the darkness. Sleep.
By morning, I should have been fit for human company again. But no. A headache had moved in instead. Discreet at first, polite — then it started doing squats in my skull, lifting weights, building muscle, settling in as a permanent roommate with all its stuff.
It’s still there.
I tried to paint bookmarks. I destroyed paper with great conviction. Too much water, too much friction. The paper started pilling like an old washed-out sweatshirt. The tape proecting the border finished the job: when I pulled it off, it took half the surface with it. An artistic crime scene. I threw them out.
After lunch, in a fit of questionable optimism: let’s get some air. Walk to the dog park with the big guy. Twenty minutes along a boulevard not built for inner peace, me calculating my trajectory to keep Mr. Anxious Shepherd from announcing the end of the world to every passerby.
We arrive.
Park closed. For “soil regeneration.” In April. On ice.
We did the loop anyway. There, around, back. The dog sniffed things. I looked at the fence with the quiet solidarity of someone who understands that you close things off to let them recover.
Coming home, the couch looked at me with the treacherous tenderness of a toxic ex.
“Come on, just five minutes,” it murmured.
I refused. Heroically.
Because I know now that naps are interdimensional portals. I always come back. Just… not the same day.