i used to be always late for school, grade school. this because i always woke up late in the mornings. and tired, too. dead tired.
deeply troubled, my mother, besides badgering our pastor to mention first my name during the roll of special prayer requests in our sunday services, had to drag me to this doctor who was always sweaty and reeked of grilled stingrays. all the doctor gave me were chewable vitamins that came in shapes of pregnant lions and tuskless elephants.
then mama got us this new cleaning lady. she was never asked to but manang gloria took it upon herself to get up as early as four in the morning to start her routine. and then she found out, to my mother's eternal relief, that i was sleepwalking.
this was manang gloria's story: i usually got up at around three in the morning and almost always went to the pantry to scavenge for left over food. as i couldn't find none i then would go into the motion of washing rice in a pot and then boiling it. while waiting for the dream pot to boil, manang gloria claimed i then scrubbed some other imagined pots in the wash tub.
strangely, my badgering mother never dwelt on this. all she did was require me to eat an extra meal, usually with a gooey soup, besides my now heartier dinners, just before i went to bed.
it has been three years now since i started working nights in this hospital. and until now, i have yet to find that rhythm, that flow to get into those sweet daytime sleep hours to compensate for my punishing night hours.
early morning today as i did my rounds i felt so sleep deprived that i thought i saw two of my patients making some kind of a fish head stew in a magical stove top grill by their hospital beds.
i told my fellow nurse this when i went back to the station hoping she would get a kick out of it. instead, she told me to take my break then and there. and so i did.
it was cold in the staff lounge and all i could think of was to have my comforter, unwashed now for two months, to wrap me to sleep. but all i had was a flimsy top sheet emblazoned with the logo of a different hospital, a stray laundry delivery from the industrial washer of both our institutions. as i drifted to sleep, i could still smell the gassy thickness of the aroma of a stew.
once my mother told this story about my sleepwalking to a guest. i believe he was a general science teacher applying for a job in mama's high school.
when he left, my mother mocked the science teacher's explanation. all about some chemical imbalance in the brain. mother would never take any perceived affront remotely questioning her sanity as well as mine. the guy didn't get the job.
as soon as i got off my break, one of the nurse assistants asked me if i had been eating during my break. she said she heard some china clanging and silver falling to the floor. i told her that couldn't be possible.
right, she said. then she went right back to pushing her hygiene care cart down the hallway. on it, was a deep plastic basin half filled with sudsy water. as she pushed on, the water in the basin churned like a thick stew on its sweet way to a roiling boil.