It was much darker at the time, don't you know?

With the exception of the night I spent at the train marathon, I have slept every night since the first of this month in the summer kitchen with the cats. They don't always turn in with me, but they are invariably in position on the futon when I wake: Autolycus at my shoulder, Hestia at my feet. The night before last, they switched up their usual routine so that I woke to find Hestia yawning and purring on the pillow beside me and Autolycus settled contentedly across my ankles. It has been very soothing even on nights when I feel terrible or when I can't sleep until after dawn. Last night was the first time this program failed. I had come home from physical therapy feeling exhausted and discombobulated, I had to run back out in the evening to vote in my local elections, I didn't have the focus to watch a movie I had been planning on. I showered early and read my way through John Griffiths Pedley's New Light on Ancient Carthage (1980). The air was suffocatingly muggy and the temperature climbed until it was just too hot to sleep under a blanket and Autolycus kept stepping on my face. He was pursuing small insects which were also intermittently keeping me awake. Hestia arranged herself on my feet, but there's only so much one little cat can do against an overheated environment and an enthusiastic bug hunter. At ten in the morning, I staggered upstairs into air conditioning, fell into the bed in Charlotte's room that used to be mine, and slept for three and a half hours of vivid, unlikely, unpleasant dreams. I really want to do something with my brain today. I feel existentially useless.