What Happened? Sleepwalking. Again.

I blinked a few times and rubbed my eyes. Yes. You are at home. You are in your bed. Cauble is purring, rubbing her face in mine. Guess she’s hungry. Blinking a few more times before stretching, I felt stiff. Every muscle hurt, like I finished a high-impact aerobic workout. I rubbed my eyes again, hoping it would clear the blurriness. It didn’t. Making out any of the numbers on the clock was impossible. It looked foreign, a language I didn’t recognize. I know several languages, like Arabic, Hindi, Greek, Egyptian, Indonesian, French, and Italian. I was learning Russian and Chinese. Mandarin Chinese is the toughest of the languages I’ve tried to digest, Russian being a close second. But the numbers on the clock? They looked like none of these.

“Cauble? You hungry?” Scratching Cauble’s head, she mewed, telling me she was hungry. At least, that’s what I thought she was saying. “Okay. Okay. I’m getting up.” I can’t remember the last time I had a boyfriend stay the night. Jace and I broke up a few weeks ago. Getting used to him not being there was tough. He worked for a law firm specializing in whistleblower cases. Jace told me he’d be moving to Chicago permanently. He didn’t ask me if I wanted to go, not that I would say yes. And honestly, I didn’t think our relationship was going anywhere. Granted, I wasn’t into him that much anyway. I preferred spending time with Cauble, drinking green tea, and reading romance novels. I’m that girl.

Cauble followed me into the kitchen, rubbing up against my leg the whole way, not that we had far to go. I lived in a small one-bedroom apartment in Cleveland, Ohio. It wasn’t far from Lake Erie, and when I say the winters are cold, trust me. They most definitely are! “Cauble, will you please back off?” I bent down and picked her up. She mewed again. “I am getting your food, you silly cat.” I nuzzled her nose, let her down to the floor, and almost fell over after I noticed the digital clocks on the microwave and the one over my glass-top stove. The images were the same as my clock in the bedroom. The patterns were the same as the ones I saw in the bedroom. I thought writing them would help me identify them. It was something I started doing after my first sleepwalking episode, a suggestion from my sleep specialist. That was twelve years ago. Twenty journals were stacked in a pile next to the bed. I searched through them last night before bed. I was trying to find something I wrote years ago. Last night’s dreams triggered it, and now I couldn’t recall it.

My body still ached. The cat was still mewing. And the food wasn’t going to open itself. I saw the symbols changing as time ticked forward, one minute at a time. I did my best to ignore it, focusing on opening the can of cat food, something cheap from the Dollar Store. Cauble was a stray I rescued from the streets of Cleveland, a scrawny little thing that looked like a puff of wind could blow it down the street. And those Erie Lake winds? They were brutal!

I twisted the can opener, pausing to stretch my fingers. They also ached, like the muscles in my arms and legs. What in the hell did I do last night? I thought to myself, thinking I must’ve done a P90X workout in my sleep. I had all the DVDs so I could do them when and if I wanted to. I hadn’t been worried about it lately, concerning myself more with work.

Cauble jumped up on the counter, making it impossible to open the can. She must’ve been starving because this wasn’t normal, not for her. Maybe it was for other cats and their owners, but this? This is not normal for her or me. I picked her up and sat her down on the laminate kitchen flooring. With the can open, I tried to sit it on the floor, and Cauble started wolfing it down before I could get it out of my hand.

That’s when I noticed my hands, both of them. Cuts. Some looked like papercuts. A few more were deeper than that, the blood long since dried, forming a puffy natural bandage. Scratches all across the knuckles of both hands. I was parched, feeling my tongue was dry and rough. My sleepwalking hadn’t slowed over the years, and the doctor said it was part of my life now. Most young adults grow out of it by reaching their mid-twenties. But me? I was nearly forty, and still, somehow, I managed to wake up without hurting myself or anyone else. Which is weird. I only drink and use dishes either made of glass or porcelain. Not one single plastic item is in my house. Well, at least nothing that I ingest. You know those plastic particulates you ingest each and every day? Most of those come from those fast food wrappers you get your burgers in. So, yeah. No fast food for me either.

My hands started to hurt, getting a glass out of the cabinet with Cauble munching her food straight out of the can. As long as I’m here, I thought, turning on the kettle for a cup of tea. No paper tea bags. Most of those are made from bleached paper. Yuck! So, instead, I have a steeper that I use to make my own tea. I hate wasting things, so I do my best to recycle everything, even the used tea leaves. I compost those. And as for Cauble, I found feeding her out of the can much easier than dirtying a dish. So I don’t.

The water felt cold, and I swallowed it as fast as possible, knowing I would regret it. But I couldn’t help it! It felt like I went four rounds with Mike Tyson. Me? I violent person? Not that I know of. I’m not too fond of the sight of violence or blood. It makes me gag.

A crisp breeze blew in from outside my apartment, which I also couldn’t figure out. The door was shut and locked when I went to be last night. I don’t live in the best neighborhood, but you find that working as a systems analyst, combing through thousands of pages of text in various languages, means you take what you can find. It was just my luck that the woman running the small complex with four units was kind enough to let me in for half the deposit, more than half of my income. The four locks on the inside looked broken, the wood shattered, and the door splintered where it once locked to the frame of the building.

Nothing inside the apartment was broken, but the breeze from outside? Forty degrees. At least that’s what Siri told me. The door was pushed shut as best as possible from the inside. None of it made any sense. None at all. What happened last night? Did I do all this in my sleep? Then it occurred to me – I should check the Ring cameras. Maybe the video feed captured all the nonsense I did. I hoped it was all me. And I was really hoping I didn’t hurt anyone.

Cauble wanted to go outside, but there wasn’t enough room to squeeze through. She wasn’t a fat cat, nowhere near the size of Garfield, but she gained a lot of weight in the few years she lived with me. Cauble went outside often, making sure to bring me presents. Like the mouse I woke up to, that was on the pillow between me and Jace one morning. Come to think of it, maybe that was why Jace decided to end it between us.

Pulling open the door, which was tough. I felt it through my whole body, residual aches reverberating through my teeth. In my teeth? I thought. Seriously? Watching Cauble take off out the door, I saw a reddish stain on the cement outside my front door. I closed my eyes, feeling queasy as the kettle started screaming at me that my tea water was hot.