Scaredy-cat

Monday, May. 31, 2004 4:01 p.m.

Note to self: I will not read Nicci French novels to sleep. For 3 reasons:

  1. The books are so compulsively readable that I end up dozing off 2 or 3 hours past my bedtime and waking up tired and cranky in the morning.

  2. Tne books are the stuff of nightmares. There were 2 that became my bedtime fodder the past few weeks, and they both deal with women who are put in terrifying situations that are rather too close to home for comfort. In Land of the Living, a woman is kidnapped but eventually escapes, only to discover that the trauma has caused amnesia, so that she cannot tell friend from foe, or remember the events leading up to her abduction. Meanwhile the kidnapper is still on the loose, possibly looking for her, and women connected to her are murdered. In Beneath the Skin, 3 women with apparently nothing in common receive anonymous letters that reveal the writer's intimate knowledge of their lives and threaten murder through horrifying means. Of course when I say too close to home I do not mean that I have been kidnapped and threatened before. But I have received emails from The Asshole for a period of about 6-8 months, in which he asked me out and sounded light and cheerful, as if we had never broken up. It was really quite unnerving. Also I have intruder paranoia from time to time.

  3. When I do fall sleep, I sleep fitfully because my nerves are all jangled by the time I put the book down. As a result, I wake up with a start in the middle of the night at the slightest noise, like the sound of the bathroom door, left ajar, opening and closing when there's a draft coming in, or mysterious thuds on the roof (don't ask), and I then find it hard to go back to sleep, thus exacerbating my sleep deprivation.

I worry for myself. I scare so easily I can't imagine how I'm going to survive those nights when my roommate is out of town. I will probably sleep with all the lights on, hence attracting the attention of psychopathic stalkers on the lookout for insomniacs who live alone. I'm pathetic. And I'm bloody 29 years old, not 89. I am not ageing gracefully.

Perhaps I should consider a self-defence class.

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