Sleeptalking

I am a total sleeptalker and have been for quite some time. It's a symptom of my scant slumber, the clinical term for that being insomnia. In eighth grade my mother attempted to wake me up for school and asked me what I wanted for breakfast and in the throes of snooze I said, "Cigarettes and a button-down shirt." She got pissed. (I was only 12 but the startling truth was I had already started smoking and reading fashion magazines.) Since then, I've had many nights punctuated by somniloquys including entire phone calls I can't recall. But being bilingual has made me even more shuteye-chatty. J's been subjected to a lot of incoherencies but also once to a Paul Verlaine poem that sprung from my subconscious. In March I shared a hotel room with my parents and they claimed I was rambling the entire night en français. And this morning at 4 a.m. I woke myself up after screaming "Qu'est-ce qu'il y a?" I stumbled to the bathroom, broken toe in tow, but was intercepted by my coked-up roommate and his comparably wide-eyed girlfriend who had heard yelling and wanted to know if I was okay. In that moment I didn't have anything to say for myself, but I'm sure tonight I'll come up with something good.