I can't sleep, again, so I'm here to tapoter un peu so that hopefully all the thoughts running around in my brain have somewhere to go instead of my head.

I've started rereading Do Not Say We Have Nothing and it is still exquisite. In novels people are always quoting stuff, like they know a ton of Literature by heart. Obviously I know that, especially in the past, people were probably able to quote stuff a lot, but there's a part for instance in this book where Zhuli, in a moment of crisis, thinks of a quote from Faust that she heard orally just the other day. In contrast I feel like words come in from one ear and out the other. I'll remember ideas and events (though as the start of my previous post attested I seem to forget really important stuff as well) but I could never just quote a whole chunk of text from something I read or heard in passing.

The closest thing I have to that is this single-line poem from Yanyi, which I'm not even sure I have word for word: "There are places I can't go, like outside my body." It really struck me when I read it and I've thought about it a few times in the few days since I've read it, not only in terms of my heart palpitations but also how I hate things like mindfulness/yoga/Headspace/meditation because they make me acutely aware of my body which is an extremely uncomfortable feeling and also how I often imagine myself in the third person as I'm experiencing events.

I actually don't really have that much to write about, which is annoying. There's a rabbit hole about social media I could go down but I'm not sure if I really have the energy to do it right now. But I know that if I clamber upstairs back into bed I'm going to start wildly jumping from topic to topic in my head again, so now I'm not super sure what to do. I suppose I could go back to reading but I'm kind of scared to get sucked back in too much and sleep too late and be tired all of tomorrow.