It's 2:56 in the morning. I can't sleep. I haven't tried to sleep. I'm lying in bed listening to the faucet dripping. The green, orange, and purple skeleton lights I bought from Duane Reade are glowing from beneath my bed.

My bed is on stilts, sort of. I don't know exactly how to describe it. It's made of wood, with railings all along it. I have a thick white mattress that I spilled black ink on a few days ago. Beneath the bed is a wooden desk, where my typewriter sits, along with a hot pink lamp and bits of paper.

I almost always sleep with my window open, until it gets too cold, that is. It may be because when I was younger, I would open my three bedroom windows and sleep with the curtains blowing in the breeze and the soft sounds from the street.

There is traffic here, of course, but it sounds muffled now. Sometimes I hear sirens, but not too often.

I started, and finished, The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets by Kathleen Alcott today. It is an incredibly beautiful book.

I just finished Leaving The Atocha Station by Ben Lerner yesterday. It is beautiful, too, but I think a lot of his ideas may be a bit over my head. Maybe not. Maybe that's a cop out. I loved reading about the man weeping in front of the painting, potentially experiencing a "profound experience of art". I liked that Lerner included the banalities of life: meals, driving, walking around, meeting people, wondering what other people are thinking. I really liked his book, but maybe I just wasn't focused enough while reading it, or something.

Kathleen Alcott writes in a way that I would love to be able to write. Her writing just...is appealing in a way that made the book feel like it was written especially for me. One of those books. It had plot twists that were devastating but believable, and interesting subject matter...Anyway I loved it. A girl in my art class today commented on it and picked it up to read the inside flap, and the polite thing for me to do would be to offer to lend it to her. I didn't, though. I'd lend it to my mom or sister, if they wanted, because it would still be in the house...

The bones in my fingers just cracked violently when I coaxed them to. The background of my computer is a black-and-white photo of Ernest Hemingway wearing glasses and sitting in something that looks like a bathtub. I have no idea where the picture came from, or who took it, but it's been my setting for months.

It's 3:05 in the morning. Last night around 1 am I heard someone banging on a door in the hallway. They would knock multiple times, loudly, and then say, "GEORGE!" Knock, knock, knock, knock knock. "GEORGE!"

It went on for at least five minutes, and I laid in bed, half hoping that someone would tell the knocker to be quiet, half wanting to open my door and hiss, "hey, shut the fuck up!" Then George, whoever he was, opened the door, and the knocker said "you left your keys in the door!" George must have mumbled something and the knocker spoke in a loud voice. He almost sounded drunk. He said, "hey, wait, wait a minute!" and there were a few more moments of speech and then quiet again.

The light from the skeleton lights is orange on my wall and the smoke alarm is blinking its red light periodically and sleep still feels far away. I don't know what time daylight arrives here, but it can't be that far off. I once heard that 3 am is called the witching hour.