fall awake

I write on a garden table, in the middle of a park, next to a swimming pool, under a thatched roof that lets in strips of sun.

It's siesta time, 37 degrees.

I do not want to sleep.

I just got attacked by a book I started this morning.

When I finished, an exclamation escaped me: “Oh, god”.

I felt like an artery had been cut.

I bought it in Madrid, months ago, and I haven't read it until now, in this hotel where I carried out a strange experiment: going several days without writing, my longest period of abstinence in decades.

The book is

, by the American Otessa Moshfegh.

A beautiful upper-class girl decides to cure her devastation by undergoing a year of continuous sleep.

She sleeps thanks to huge painkillers prescribed by an extraordinary and corrupt psychiatrist, Dr. Tuttle.

She devours chemical anesthesia in doses that would kill anyone.

She is so solid in her coldness, in her determination, in her toughness, in her contempt for the only friend she has—the loud, bulimic Reva—in her submissive love for Trevor—a corporate jerk—that I moved forward wondering if the book could be better.

It always was: more ferocious, more immense.

I said to myself: “Okay, Otessa, but how are you going to end this awesomeness?”

And then I came to the most prodigious final paragraph I've read in a long time, and this sentence: “There he is, a person diving into the unknown,

and she did it wide awake.”

And I said, "Oh, god."

I was mute.

I went to the room, opened my computer, looked for other books of his.

Although the truth is that I do not know if I want others.

After this, she would have been able to rest.

But someone who writes like this never rests.

I went downstairs, sat in the park, woke up the beast and wrote.

I spent the rest of the day without speaking, I don't know if I'm happy or sad.

Her falling awake in my own emptiness.

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